One in every eleven persons born in Mexico has gone to the U.S. The National Review reported that in 2014 $1.87 billion was spent on incarcerating illegal immigrant criminals….Now add hundreds of billions for welfare and remittances! MICHAEL BARGO, Jr…… for the AMERICAN THINKER.COM

Shocking poll result: A Republican leads in the race to replace Barbara Boxer

Ever
since the demographic composition of California was transformed by the
infusion of millions of Hispanics and the driving out of middle and
upper middle class residents (of any race) through high taxes, the state
has been a Democrat stronghold. A sure win for the Electoral College
and Senate.

Could that possibly change?

The
announced retirement of Senator Barbara Boxer has created an open seat,
and there has been much glee among progressives over the prospect of
the dimwitted but vicious Boxer being succeeded by the photogenic and
much smarter attorney general of California, Kamala Harris, who has been
dubbed “The next Barack Obama.”What could possibly derail this progressive dream? Joel Pollak writes at Breitbart:

The leader in the race to replace retiring U.S. Senator Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) in America’s most liberal state is… Republican Condoleezza Rice, according to a new Field Poll
released Wednesday. Rice, the former Secretary of State and Stanford
don, is backed by 49% of voters–ahead of Attorney General Kamala Harris,
the liberal Democrat who was the first to declare.

The
poll, which sampled 972 likely voters in California, presented
respondents with a list of 18 potential candidates and asked if they
“would be inclined or not inclined to vote for that person,” with no
limit on the number they could support. Rice led among both male and
female voters, and did well among Latino voters, though the top choice
for Latinos remains former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Rice
and Harris each polled 74% among their respective political parties.

The
only problem is persuading Rice to run. She enjoys multiple
appointments at Stanford University, which is a much pleasanter place to
spend time than Washington, DC. And Democrats in California have been
known to run particularly vicious statewide campaigns against Republican
challengers, such as the attacks on Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina when
they ran for statewide office. Rice has kept her private life quite
private, and I have no doubt that Democrats would stoop as low as they
had to in order to damage her in a fight for the Senate seat they regard
as belonging to them.

Marco Rubio’s excuse du jour for his central role in passing the
monstrous Gang of Eight amnesty/immigration-surge bill is the most
shameless yet: “Rubio: Gang of 8 Bill Never Intended to Become Law“.
Coulda fooled me!

The Hill wryly noted “This represents a sharp departure for Rubio.”

I’ll say. In his final speech on the Senate floor before voting on
S.744, Rubio concluded, “Here in America, generations of unfulfilled
dreams will finally come to pass. And that’s why I support this reform.”
Not sure how much clearer you can get.

Rubio’s latest excuse would have fooled Harry Reid too; he dedicated the
bill to Ted Kennedy and said, when it passed, “And while I am sad that
Senator Kennedy isn’t here to see history made, I know he is looking at
us proudly and loudly.” Whatever that means, it sure doesn’t sound like
he didn’t intend the Gang of Eight bill to become law.

Or Lindsey Graham, after the bill got 68 votes: “This is overwhelming support for the bill … This is incredibly pleasing.”

Pat Leahy didn’t seem to think the bill was just for show either: “Today
is another historic day in the Senate. This legislation will reunite
families. It will bring millions of people out of the shadows and into
our legal system. It will spur job growth and reduce our deficit. And it
will make us safer.”

Or Chuck Schumer: “The bill has generated a level of support that we believe will be impossible for the House to ignore.”

If I may steal a line from one of my Twitter followers, next thing you
know Rubio will tell us it was really just the Gang of Seven all along.

By Dan Cadman
CIS Immigration Blog, February 16, 2016
. . .
Calculating those figures, it means that more than 16 percent of the
individuals who were subjected to these secondary inquiries (which
represent only a small fraction of the workforce) — and, as Roth notes,
already recipients of airport clearances — were illegal aliens with no
right to work. What's more, Roth also notes that airport authorities
routinely fail to annotate their security credentials with the
expiration date of aliens' employment authorization documents, meaning
that such persons are routinely employed in sterile areas long past
their legally authorized right to work.

Which raises the question: Why have rules not been written that simply
preclude individuals with limited time authorizations on their work
permits or, better yet, who are not legally authorized to live in the
United States on a permanent basis, from being employed in secure areas
of airports? Is this so onerous, given the importance of securing the
safety of the traveling public?

But back to the immediate issue of TSA and its oversight of airport
authorities doing the credentialing. There is obviously something
seriously amiss.

CUNY Devises H-1B Trick, NYT Cheers, DHS Will Probably Accept It
By David North
CIS Immigration Blog, February 18, 2016
. . .
What CUNY is doing, publicly, is approximately what Wright State
University in Dayton, Ohio, did quietly. That resulted in such a scandal
that two university employees were fired and the WSU Provost was
demoted, as we reported earlier. In both cases, the universities used
their power to obtain H-1B workers in unlimited numbers in order to
benefit private, non-university corporations; at Wright State a member
of the WSU Board of Trustees was president of one of the for-profit,
benefitting corporations.

The immigration law allows universities, and university-connected
entities to bring in H-1B workers outside the 65,000 and 20,000 ceilings
— and the Obama administration has done yeoman service to expand the
loophole. The connections are sometimes quite tenuous.

5.Another Embezzlement and Three Other Developments in EB-5 Land
By David North
CIS Immigration Blog, February 16, 2016
. . .
GAO quietly made this observation:

However, the study was not intended to address the program's costs
which are important for assessing a program's net economic impact. Both
USCIS and ESA officials confirmed the study would be an economic
valuation which, unlike an evaluation considers only the benefits of
economic activity, and does not assess the program costs. (Emphasis Added.)

The slippery term "valuation" is a new one to me in this context, but it
fits neatly with the way DHS manipulates things in defense of this
program. I can assure you that two of the real costs of the program will
not be mentioned by the Department of Commerce, one obvious, and one quite obscure.

The obvious cost of the program is the moral one of selling membership in our society for half a million a pop.

The more obscure one is that, given the workings of immigration law, for
every visa sold to a rich alien, a visa is denied to an alien in the
first or second employment-based categories — that's where the really
skilled immigrants are found. Were there to be a reduction in the number
of applications for the EB-5 visas, the unused visas would "fall down"
into the categories where one truly finds the best and the brightest.
. . .http://www.cis.org/north/another-embezzlement-and-three-other-developments-eb-5-land

6.Schools Undergo Comprehensive Immigration Reform
By John Wahala
CIS Immigration Blog, February 19, 2016
. . .
Given the obstacles they face, the poor academic performance of
immigrant students is not surprising and has been well documented.
English-language fluency, test scores, and graduation rates lag far
behind. Some researchers have even called the situation a crisis that
threatens democracy itself. But more troubling than slow academic
progress is the way mass immigration is shifting the educators' focus.
When resources and time are diverted from teaching, the quality of
education deteriorates. Learning becomes secondary when teachers are
trying to keep children safe and well-adjusted.
. . .http://www.cis.org/wahala/schools-undergo-comprehensive-immigration-reform

7.The Divisive, Political Pope
By Marguerite Telford
CIS Immigration Blog, February 18, 2016
. . .
The Catholic Church recognizes that sovereign nations have the right to
control their borders and to enforce their laws. The U.S. system of
legal immigration is the most generous in the world, allowing in over
one million legal permanent immigrants annually, more than all the rest
of the nations of the world combined. These numbers do not even include
the hundreds of thousands of guestworkers, foreign students, and illegal
immigrants offered temporary protected status, parole, or asylum. Our
immigration ceilings are set through a democratic process and try to
balance openness with the need to screen for national security purposes,
to allow immigrants to assimilate, and to avoid disadvantaging American
workers at a time of high unemployment, underemployment, stagnant
wages, and increasing economic inequality.

Policymakers must recognize the facts about our immigration policy. They
do not have the luxury of only measuring those coming across our
borders "with names, stories, [and] families".

Pope Francis mistakenly declares, without any support from the Catholic
Catechism, that the U.S. government, the majority of her citizens, the
majority of America Catholics, and Mr. Trump are not Christian, as we do
not support allowing tens of thousands of illegal aliens to flood
across our border. The Church has encouraged it and, as the Pope pointed
out this week, an enormous number of people have died making the trip
and an even larger number have been victimized and injured, both
physically and emotionally.
. . .http://www.cis.org/telford/divisive-political-pope

8.Pope Francis and Immigration in Mexico
By Kausha Luna
CIS Immigration Blog, February 18, 2016
. . .
On Wednesday, the Pope headed to the northern border of Mexico. In
Ciudad Juarez, a city that sits opposite El Paso, Texas, Pope Francis
delivered the most anticipated message in terms of migration. During the
homily, Pope Francis finally alluded to Central American migrants,
"Here in Ciudad Juarez, as border zone, thousands of migrants from
Central America and other countries are concentrated, without forgetting
the many Mexicans who also look to pass 'to the other side,' a path, a
pathway loaded with terrible injustices, enslaved, kidnapped, extorted,
any of our brothers are the result of the business of human trafficking,
trafficking in persons." He went on:
. . .
Originally, the Pope had planned to cross the border into the United
States, which would have been an extremely political statement amidst
the immigration debate in the United States. Even though he did not
cross the border, Pope Francis managed to insert himself into the U.S.
immigration debate. On the sixth and final day of his visit, just before
returning to Rome, Pope Francis made one last statement on migration
when asked about Donald Trump: "A person who thinks only about building
walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not
Christian."
. . .http://www.cis.org/luna/pope-francis-and-immigration-mexico

9.Deportation Protesters Arrested after Blocking Chicago Street; Follow the Money
By Jerry Kammer
CIS Immigration Blog, February 17, 2016
. . .
The protest was organized by a group called Organized Communities
Against Deportations, whose fiscal sponsor is the Illinois Coalition for
Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR). On January 1, shortly after the
Department of Homeland Security announced plans to deport Central
Americans whose asylum petitions have been denied, ICIRR received a
$450,000 grant from the Marguerite Casey Foundation. The Seattle-based
foundation's website says the grant was intended: "For leadership
development and engagement of immigrant and refugee families in
organizing and advocacy."

10.Mr. Clooney, Would You Be Willing to Welcome Refugees into Your Home?
By Nayla Rush
CIS Immigration Blog, February 16, 2016
. . .
When asked by the French journalist "Would you be willing to welcome refugees into your home?", Clooney replied:

Amal and I discussed it. It happens that no refugee can set foot in
the United States, but we would be ready to do it. I spend two or three
days a week trying to raise funds for Syrian refugees, this counts more
than anything in my life, actually. I understand your suggestion but I
have the impression I am dedicating a lot of energy and time to this
cause. Simply because I am lucky. I am not a politician but one thing I
can do is attract attention. (Emphasis added)

Is Mr. Clooney misinformed? Syrian refugees not only can and have come
to the United States recently, the U.S. government has made arrangements
for 10,000 more to arrive in FY 2016 (as he himself pointed out in the
interview).

In any case, Mr. Clooney makes a valid point even if he is not quite up
front about it. His message seems to be the following: he is deeply
touched by this humanitarian crisis, and he wants to help but does not
necessarily want his life disrupted. His answer is to raise funds in
order to ease the plight of these refugees while keeping his own door
closed. Who can blame him for that?
. . .http://www.cis.org/rush/mr-clooneywould-you-be-willing-welcome-refugees-your-home

11.Border Surge Solution: Send ‘Em to Camp David!
By Michelle Malkin
Human Events Online, February 17, 2016
. . .
As Brandon Judd of the National Border Patrol Council testified on
Capitol Hill recently: “The cartels understood that the unaccompanied
minors would force the Border Patrol to deploy Agents to these crossing
areas in order to take the minors into custody. I want to stress this
point because it has been completely overlooked by the press,” he told
the House Judiciary Committee. The unaccompanied minors could have
walked right up to the port of entry and requested asylum if they were
truly escaping political persecution or violence. “Why did the cartels
drive them to the middle of the desert and then have them cross over the
Rio Grande only to surrender to the first Border Patrol Agent they came
across?” Judd challenged.

“The reason is that it completely tied up our manpower and allowed the
cartels to smuggle whatever they wanted across our border.”

This is just another maddening example of Obama’s warped priorities at
work. Instead of building effective walls and enforcing our borders to
prevent the coming illegal immigration waves manufactured by criminal
racketeers, this administration rushes to build welcome center magnets
that shelter the next generation of Democrat voters.
. . .http://humanevents.com/2016/02/17/border-surge-solution-send-em-to-camp-david/

12.GOP Baffled As Voters Rally to Popular Candidate
By Ann Coulter
Human Events Online, February 17, 2016
. . .
I wish he’d stop showing off, the little scamp, but maybe the GOP
establishment will finally get the message that voters have been waiting
a really long time for a candidate who would put Americans first. Not
donors, not plutocrats, not foreigners, and certainly not foreign
plutocrats (i.e., Fox News).

Trump is the first presidential candidate in 50 years who might
conceivably: (1) deport illegal aliens, (2) build a wall, (3) block
Muslim immigration, (4) flout political correctness, (5) bring
manufacturing home, and (6) end the GOP’s neurotic compulsion to start
wars in some godforsaken part of the world.

That’s all that matters! Are you listening yet, RNC?

There is not another candidate who agrees with Trump on all these
positions. Maybe one issue, but not all of them — and if it’s
immigration, they would be lying.

13.Pope Francis Rips Capitalism, American Immigration Policy at Mexican Border
By Ben Shapiro
Breitbart.com, February 18, 2016
. . .
The reason for the humanitarian crisis driving people north is the
corrupt anti-capitalist governance so common to Latin America – the same
sort of governance the pope believes is apparently more godly than the
capitalism drawing people like a magnet to the United States. So the
same system the pope decries is the system the pope wants inundated with
victims of those who oppose that system. How ironic. Even more ironic:
the Vatican remains one of the most immigration-restrictive states on
earth.

This is nothing new from Pope Francis, who has spent much of his tenure
bashing capitalism and American border policy. Back in September, Pope
Francis spoke on the National Mall, where he explained, “Thousands of
persons are led to travel north in search of a better life for
themselves and their loved ones, in search of greater opportunities. Is
this not what we want for our own children? We need to avoid a common
temptation nowadays: to discard whatever proves troublesome. Let us
remember the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto
you.’”
. . .http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/02/18/pope-prays-for-migrants-at-mexican-border/

14.Pope Slimes Trump, Agitates for Open Borders
The liberation theology-loving pontiff thinks America is evil for having a border.
By Matthew Vadum
FrontPageMag.com, February 19, 2016
. . .
Although Vatican City, recognized as a sovereign nation, has very strict
immigration controls, Francis spent Wednesday afternoon blasting U.S.
immigration policy and condemning capitalism during a mass strategically
located near the fence that separates Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, from El
Paso, Texas. He previously hoped to make an even bigger spectacle of
himself by walking in solidarity with other aliens across the border,
but U.S. officials nixed that plan.

At the service Francis honored "migrants who have perished trying to
reach the United States just a stone's throw away." The pope also
blessed crosses beside "shoes of migrants who died," adding "No more
death! No more exploitation!"

Sounding like a Marxist community organizer, Francis blamed U.S.
immigration policies for causing a "humanitarian crisis" and declared
that "the flow of capital cannot decide the flow of people."

Trump says the nation can’t take the risk of bringing more terrorists
into the country, when the FBI can’t even handle the 1,000-plus
terrorism cases it’s investigating now.

Democrats hope to twist such common-sense thinking into racism. Good
luck with that. Trump won every demographic, and among both
conservatives and independents.

Unlike any other candidate, Trump has locked into people’s anger over
illegal immigration. It’s plain that the electorate is tired of being
pushed around by multiculturalists and Islamic apologists in both
parties.

If current trends continue, the U.S. will admit some 1 million new
Muslim-origin immigrants over the next decade, plus hundreds of
thousands of foreign Muslim students and guest workers.

16.U.S. Failed Three Times to Deport Illegal Alien Who Murdered Woman
Judicial Watch Corruption Chronicles, February 18, 2016
. . .
Here’s what we already know from local media reports in Norwich, the
city of about 40,000 residents where the murder occurred; the DHS agency
responsible for deporting illegal immigrants, Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE), failed to remove Jacques at least three times dating
back to 2002. As if this weren’t atrocious enough, Jacques spent 17
years in prison for attempted murder before authorities released
him—instead of deporting him—in January of 2015, the Norwich Bulletin
reports. Six months later the 41-year-old illegal alien convict stabbed
25-year-old Casey Chadwick to death. Police said Chadwick died of sharp
forced injuries to the head and neck. Jacques is being held on a $1
million bond.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case. In the last few years
illegal immigrants with lengthy criminal histories have been allowed to
remain in the U.S. despite being repeat offenders. Judicial Watch has
investigated several of the cases and obtained public records from the
government. For instance, back in 2008 JW launched a California public
records request with the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department to obtain he
arrest and booking information on Edwin Ramos, an illegal alien from El
Salvador who murdered three innocent American citizens. Ramos was a
member of a renowned violent street gang and had been convicted of two
felonies as a juvenile (a gang-related assault on a bus passenger and
the attempted robbery of a pregnant woman) yet he was allowed to remain
in the country.
. . .http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/02/u-s-failed-3-times-to-deport-illegal-alien-who-murdered-woman/

17.Pope Francis: Tear Down the Vatican Wall!
By John Nolte
Breitbart.com, September 24, 2015
. . .
And then there’s the issue of immigration.

Pope Francis urged Catholic bishops in the United States to open their
doors to immigrants, asserting that “these people will enrich America
and its Church.”

As a Latin American, the Pope apologized for “pleading my own case,”
when speaking about the influx of Hispanic immigrants into the United
States. He also thanked the bishops for the work they have done for
immigrants in this country. …

“Perhaps you will be challenged by their diversity,” he said. “But know
that they also possess resources meant to be shared. So do not be afraid
to welcome them.”

The Pope also urged the bishops to offer immigrants “the warmth of the love of Christ.”

Again, I mean no disrespect but this is coming from a man who lives in a
city-state completely surrounded, literally, by giant walls. Vatican
City is a literal fortress.

What would happen to Vatican City if it was to do what Francis is asking America to do?

I’m assuming Pope Francis could order such a thing tomorrow, and after
the walls came down he could also choose to greet the wave of “pilgrims”
with the “warmth of the love of Christ.”

Of course Pope Francis would never do such a thing because he knows what
would happen: Vatican City would be no more, everyone’s security and
well-being would be compromised, and the standard of living for close to
a thousand residents would be destroyed. Chaos would completely destroy
the home of St. Peter.

18.Trump is Right, the Pope is Wrong:
Like it or not, one of the most loathsome public figures got the better of one of the most beloved
By Sarah E. Cupp
The New York Daily News, February 19, 2016
. . .
While one could certainly characterize Trump’s immigration policy as
“unwelcoming,” there's nothing un-Christian about securing the border
and protecting the homeland, even through the use of a wall. It’s why
Vatican City originally erected walls. It’s why Jerusalem erected walls.
It’s why Rome had walls. Does the Pope believe the only Christian
approach is open borders? I doubt it, but if so, he’s pretty naive.

19.Scalia’s Impact on Patriotic Immigration Reform — in Life and Death
By John Reid
VDare.com February 16, 2016
. . .
I could go on and on about Scalia’s great legacy. But I want to now focus on the immediate implications of his death.

The good news: assuming the Republican-controlled Senate has the
backbone to hold off confirming any Obama appointee for the remainder of
the year, Scalia’s passing will not affect the two most important cases
for VDARE readers: U.S. V. Texas (whether the Court upholds the 5th
Circuit’s injunction against Obama’s executive Amnesty) and Fisher v.
Texas (on the constitutionality of Texas’s Affirmative Action policies).

The 5th Circuit ruled against the Obama administration in U.S. vs. Texas,
so if there is a 4-4 tie, its ruling stands. Ties do not create any
national precedent, but the lower court’s ruling blocks the Amnesty
nationwide.

In Fisher v. Texas, Elena Kagan has already agreed to recuse
herself because, while serving as Obama’s Solicitor General, she had
involved herself in the litigation. Thus the Court could strike down
Affirmative Action in a 4-3 vote.

Of course, this does not mean that these cases will necessarily cone out
that way. Roberts and Kennedy could vote with the liberals (though I’m
not too worried about Roberts in Fisher.) However, if they
switched votes, we would still have lost if Scalia were alive. (In
Fisher, the Fifth Circuit ruled in favor of Affirmative Action, so if
Scalia were alive and Kennedy voted with the liberals, the court would
be deadlocked 4-4. However, unlike U.S. v. Texas, the lower court ruled in favor of Affirmative Action, so a tie would maintain it.)
. . .http://www.vdare.com/articles/scalias-impact-on-patriotic-immigration-reform-in-life-and-death

20.The President Doesn’t Deserve an EZ-Pass in Replacing Scalia
By Betsy McCaughey
Family Security Matters, February 18, 2016
. . .
In 2007, New York Sen. Charles Schumer called on his Democratic
colleagues to vote against any nominees proposed by George W. Bush,
because Schumer feared the court was moving to the right. He said, "We
should reverse the presumption of confirmation."

Fast-forward to 2016, and Schumer, Biden and Leahy have had a change of
heart. They say Obama's nominee should be speedily confirmed without
regard to politics. In Leahy's words, the Supreme Court is "too
important to our democracy to be understaffed for partisan reasons."
Hypocritical nonsense.

The danger is that some GOP Senators actually buy that baloney. When
Obama nominated radical judicial activists Elena Kagan and Sonia
Sotomayor, Lindsey Graham (R-SC) voted for them, saying the Senate
should defer to the president on court nominees. On Sunday, Graham
pledged that "if Hillary Clinton wins the White House and she puts a
liberal who's well qualified, I'll vote for them."

As if senatorial courtesy trumps the survival of freedom.

The court, currently divided 4-4, is on the brink of an activist
majority. An activist court will - for starters - perpetuate racial
preferences, uphold amnesty for illegals, and concoct new "rights" as
fast as they eviscerate conscience rights, the Second Amendment and the
rest of our written Constitution.

21.One Decision Scalia’s Absence Likely Won’t Change? Immigration
By Siobhán O'Grady
ForeignPolicy.com, February 14, 2016
. . .
Hiroshi Motomura, a law professor at the University of California at Los
Angeles, said he doesn’t expect Scalia’s death to have a significant
impact on the outcome of the immigration case. Because Texas already won
an injunction to freeze the program in lower courts, it will rely on
conservative justices to ensure those earlier decisions prevail in the
Supreme Court. A tie will automatically maintain the earlier freeze on
implementing the program.

Motomura said he believes Scalia would not have voted to reverse the
earlier decision, and that in general, “Scalia’s absence matters if and
when he would have been a vote to reverse.”

22.Did Scalia's Death Just Win The Texas Immigration Case For Obama?
An interview with Randal Meyer, legal associate in the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies
By Jared Meyer
Forbes.com, February 16, 2016
. . .
JM: Is it possible that the Supreme Court will still rule against President Obama’s executive actions on immigration?

RM: Dan Stein on SCOTUSBlog notes that “Even those Justices on the Court
who might agree with the president’s views on immigration policy
generally should appreciate the precedent-setting decision they would be
making by allowing the president to run roughshod over the
constitutional separation-of-powers doctrine.” So there is some chance
that at least some of the liberal justices will “switch sides” to reign
in presidential lawlessness, as executive authority can be wielded by
both parties. For example, the 2014 decision in National Labor Relations
Board v. Noel Canning, which voided President Obama’s so-called recess
appointments, was unanimous.

But as of now, the four liberal justices are expected to side with the
federal government and permit the president to unilaterally rewrite the
law. If none of the conservatives join them—Chief Justice Roberts and
Justice Kennedy are possible targets for the government’s arguments—the
best that can be expected is a 4-4 outcome, which creates no new law and
affirms the lower court’s decision that sustained the injunction
against DAPA. But even if the Court decides to hold this case over until
there’s a ninth justice, that still means that the injunction stands
into the next administration—at which point a Republican president would
presumably scrap the plan, while a Democratic one would change it in
some way that moots the case.
. . .http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaredmeyer/2016/02/16/did-scalias-death-just-win-the-texas-immigration-case-for-obama/#6c9a376673de

23.Pope Francis: I'm Only a Material Guy
By Deborah C. Tyler
American Thinker Blog, February 19, 2016
. . .
The pope is a dream come true for the ruling class of Mexico. Francis is
the world's preeminent bourgeois reactionary, exhorting people to skip
the class struggle and reject the revolution. Just run away from your
homes, families, and country and invade the United States. Plenty of
people there insist that other Americans take care of you and your
extended families.
. . .http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/02/pope_francis_im_only_a_material_goy.html

24.'El Papa' Embraces Raul Castro But Calls Donald Trump Anti-Christian!
By Silvio Canto, Jr.
American Thinker, February 19, 2016
. . .
As he left Mexico, Pope Francis made a terrible mistake by saying that
Donald Trump is not a Christian. I am not sure if he was answering a
question or speaking at a meeting. He had finished a Mass on the El
Paso-Ciudad Juarez border.

Third, is a border now un-Christian? How did we get to the point that
defending borders and promoting legal immigration is now inhumane?

Fourth, El Papa has given Mr. Trump a huge gift. I am not a Trump
supporter, but I believe that the U.S. has every right to protect and
defend its borders. I don't know whether building a wall from Laredo to
San Diego is the best answer. However, it may work in some isolated
regions currently used by cartels to bring drugs and people.

25.Trump, the Pope, and the Bible
By Rabbi Aryeh Spero
American Thinker, February 19, 2016
. . .
If it is un-Christian to engage in self-defense, then it is un-Christian
to fight a defensive war. For sure, this is not a biblical attitude
and, I imagine, not in sync with the Protestant outlook upon which this
country was founded. In fact, acts of self-defense constitute not only
virtue, but also morality. Morality is what we ought to do, and, first
and foremost, we are required, in the name of personal responsibility,
to meet our obligations toward those whom we have freely chosen in
relationship. Mr. Trump has suggested not using weapons, but merely a
static, non-aggressive wall to protect Americans who are pleading for
protection. Up until now, nothing has worked; our borders are porous. A
wall would be a major remedy.

Perhaps the good pope has not read of the dozens of Americans who have
been physically harmed, their property invaded and trashed, and
threatened by those crossing the border illegally. Worse, under the
burden of caring for illegals, many communities, especially in rural
areas, have been forced to shut down clinics and hospitals that have
gone bankrupt and are made dysfunctional by schools no longer able to
teach and educate due to the excessive burdens of unprepared newcomers.

I ask the pope the following question. No doubt, religion asks that we
make sacrifices for others. But are those sacrifices to be so open-ended
and so unpredictable that one is actually required to suffer…and have
his children suffer? At stake here is not merely doing without certain
luxuries and opulence; rather, it is actual suffering by tens of
thousands of innocent Americans. The elites asking that we make these
enormous sacrifices are not, nor their children, having to sacrifice to
any similar degree.
. . .http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/02/trump_the_pope_and_the_bible.html

26.How The Left’s Immigration Tactics Created Donald Trump
Unapologetic liberal hegemony explains the rise of Donald Trump and the European Right.
By Greg Jones
The Federalist, February 15, 2016
. . .
Even after the Boston Marathon bombing, the San Bernardino shooting, and
several would-be attacks fortunately intercepted by law enforcement,
the administration insists that accepting even more refugees, this time
from North Africa and the Middle East, is in America’s best interest.
. . .
Those who feel otherwise have been dismissed by left-wing mouthpieces as
racists or right-wing terrorists, despite the fact that most simply
insist the president enforce the law and put their interests above those
from elsewhere. You know, do the job he was elected to do. Is it any
wonder that Trump’s pledges to build a wall on our southern border and
halt Muslim immigration, at least temporarily, are gaining steam?

The president and his ideological cronies have created a monster, and he
has terrible hair. But rather than incurring the wrath of the mob
himself, the monster is leading it straight to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,
pitchforks in hand.

As Martin Luther King once said, “A riot is the language of the
unheard.” This is a riot alright, albeit a moral and philosophical one,
and those making the noise have been repeatedly rebuffed by an
administration that feels it can run roughshod over a country that
stripped it of both houses of Congress.

27.Conservatives Beware of Immigration “Guru” Ron Hira
RedState.com, February 19, 2016
. . .
It might be understandable for a few progressive interlocutors to slip
through the cracks with the presidential primary debate frenzy underway.

But the two left-wing activists Langer highlights, Ron Hira, a
researcher at the George Soros-funded Economic Policy Institute (EPI),
and Democratic operative Curtis Ellis have routinely been welcomed with
open arms by Breitbart, WorldNetDaily, National Review, the Daily Caller, and others, including well before the intensity of primary season arrived.

Unfortunately, it’s not just conservative outlets that are giving them
quarter. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has
twice provided a platform as well to Mr. Hira, inviting him to testify
first in 2013, and again as recently as last spring.

Is Mr. Hira, who recently became an associate professor at Howard
University, the best expert conservatives can muster to point out what
are otherwise important and needed areas of debate around temporary
worker programs?

28.Who Really Understands the Threatened End of Europe — Trump or Rubio?
By James Kirkpatrick
VDare.com, February 13, 2016
. . .
Rubio runs ads warning that “what happened in France could happen here.”
But he seems utterly oblivious to how uncontrolled immigration enables
Islamic terrorists to strike within Western societies.

Rubio epitomizes the common trend among Beltway Right operatives:
compensate for their cowardice with eagerness to flaunt American
military power abroad. Rubio’s foreign policy promises a return to the
George W. Bush years. But geopolitically, Bush’s policies were a
disaster. And domestically, they tarred Republicans in the eyes of the
young as the “War Party.”

What’s more, the foundation for American power, and more broadly,
Western power, is crumbling before our eyes. The sweeping demographic
changes in Europe are a world-historical event. The homeland of Western
Civilization, for all intents and purposes, may cease to exist within
our lifetimes.

29.Pope Should Read Bible, Catechism
By Bob Lonsberry
BobLonsberry.com, February 19, 2016
. . .
Which must come as a surprise to the 51 percent of Americans who, in the
most recent poll, believe that a wall along the Mexican border is a
good idea. Presumably those people did not realize that their political
belief stripped them, in the eyes of the pope, of their religious
standing and doomed them to an eternity in hell.
. . .
American immigration policy -- namely that one must come to our country
in accordance with our law -- is exactly in step with the official
teachings of the Catholic Church. A physical means to enforce the law --
a wall -- has no bearing upon that.

Catholics are certainly willing to tolerate a disagreement between Trump
and the pope, but some may not appreciate this kind of language. At
least Trump didn't him a liar or have his lawyer send a cease-and-desist
order (yet).

Catholic teaching on immigration is complex, the call to love thy
neighbor is straightforward. Catholics aren't really called to some kind
of open-borders ideology, as Trump supporters are likely to point out.
And the pope didn't actually say it was illegitimate to build border
walls. He said Christians should only be focused on building walls at
the expense of building bridges, a metaphor as much as a reference to
literal, physical walls.
. . .http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pope-and-donald-trump-1455840457

Univision News' national broadcast continues to howl at any legislative
attempt to protect local communities by enforing our immigration laws.
The latest instance comes from efforts in Wisconsin.

Wednesday evening's newscast featured a story about two enforcement
proposals recently filed in Wisconsin: one to ban sanctuary city
policies, and the other to ban local governments from issuing official
alternate ID's to illegal immigrants.

32.Immigration Law is Torn Between Administrative Law and Criminal Law
By Michael Kagan
Notice & Comment, February 12, 2016
. . .
Immigration law is now torn between two alternative paradigms, which
compete with each other and with the vestiges of traditional plenary
power. One alternative paradigm is certainly administrative law. In a
sense, administrative law has been in the background all along. As Alina
Das has observed, the government has increasingly turned to
administrative law doctrines to shield its immigration decisions from
judicial scrutiny. Where in the past the government might have cited the
Chinese Exclusion Case, now the government will cite Chevron or Heckler.

But we should remember that plenary power declined in large part because
the Supreme Court became less willing to tolerate the civil liberties
costs that came with unrestrained government authority over individuals.
This was the essential problem in Zadvydas. But if this is the
central problem with plenary power, it is not clear that administrative
law will be an entirely satisfactory replacement. Administrative law
lacks the tools to cope with the loss of individual liberty which is
intrinsic to immigration enforcement. (Prof. Das’s article does an
excellent job illustrating this problem in the context of habeas review
of immigration detention.)

To put it bluntly, the EPA, the FDA, the VA, the NLRB and the myriad
other agencies that are the focus of administrative law do not operate
private detention centers. By contrast, Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) detains more than 400,000 people per year. The
draconian use of government force that is inherent in immigration
enforcement raises a very different set of constitutional concerns than
the regulatory contexts that produced Chevron, Skidmore, Overton Park, Auer, Brand X,
and the other leading cases of administrative law. But that does not
mean that immigration is an island unto itself. We do have very well
developed legal doctrines to regulate deprivations of liberty like those
involved in immigration enforcement. We call it criminal procedure.
That is the other paradigm that now competes to drive the evolution of
immigration law.
. . .http://www.yalejreg.com/blog/immigration-law-is-torn-between-administrative-law-and-criminal-law-by-michael-kagan

33.Will Republicans Return to Reagan's Voice on Immigration?
By Javier Palomarez
CNN.com, February 17, 2016
. . .
While the policy solutions proposed here are striking -- work visas,
open borders and the recognition that the United States should maintain
good relations with Mexico -- what really sets this apart from the
current discourse on immigration is the tone. Both Bush and Reagan spoke
from a place of understanding and compassion, and they both went on to
act on it -- Reagan won the Republican nomination, but Bush became his
vice president, and eventually President.

In fact, as President of the United States, Reagan would later sign
legislation creating a pathway to citizenship for 3 million undocumented
immigrants. This act earned him the support of many in the Hispanic
community, some of whom now vote Democratic, but remember and praise
Reagan as the President who made it possible for them to stay in the
United States, build lives here, start businesses and raise families.
Their children are now voters, too.
. . .http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/17/opinions/will-republicans-return-to-reagan-on-immigration-palomarez/index.html

34.Contraception, Immigration, and Hypocrisy
By A. Barton Hinkle
The Richmond Times-Dispatch, February 16, 2016
. . .
The two sides took the same stances in the various cases concerning
whether bakers, photographers, and others who object to gay marriage on
religious grounds should be forced to provide services for gay weddings.
Conservatives said religious liberty trumped equal-protection
guarantees; liberals said the opposite.

And then everybody switched.

Well, maybe not everybody — generalizations are dangerous. But plenty of
people on the right started sounding like leftists, and plenty of those
on the left started sounding like rightists. Why?

Illegal immigration.

As Christianity Today reported recently, “US Churches Defy
Federal Law and Offer Sanctuary to Illegal Immigrants.” Federal
immigration raids have prompted at least 50 churches across the country
to take in scores of unlawfully present foreigners.

And boy, how the tunes have changed.

“U.S. Churches Offer Safe Haven For A New Generation Of Immigrants,”
reported NPR, which characterized the action as “civil disobedience.” In
November, it interviewed an undocumented immigrant who had been staying
in a Texas church for 15 months. NPR really put the screws to her with
hard-hitting questions about “how she would respond to people who say
that sanctuaries like the ones she used shouldn’t be allowed” (“When I
hear these words of hate, I don’t understand them,” she answered) and
what she thought of “the objection that she has violated the law” (“I
don’t really see it that way”).

The liberal ThinkProgress — a sharp critic of Hobby Lobby — has
likewise painted the movement in golden hues with a paean to its
“activist roots.” But it recognizes there are difficulties, too. For
instance, “there is no single national organization dedicated to helping
churches find a suitable sanctuary case.” Gosh, if only there were!

Arizona congressman Raul Grijalva, who denounced the Hobby Lobby ruling
as a giant step backward, thinks the sanctuary church movement is
wonderful: “It speaks to faith and it speaks to the humanity of this
issue.”

35.Marco Rubio’s Immigration Fog: His Stance on His Own Reform Legislation is Impossible to Discern
Marco Rubio worked feverishly to pass an immigration reform bill that he also says was never meant to be a law
By Simon Maloy
Salon.com, February 16, 2016
. . .
At one level, Rubio was just stating the obvious: very few bills passed
by either house of Congress make it to the president’s desk without
going through some significant changes. As it was poised to pass the
Senate, though, Rubio specifically addressed conservative critics of the
legislation and told them that while it obviously wasn’t their idea of
the perfect immigration bill, it was conservative enough and merited
passage. “I realize that in the end, many of my fellow conservatives
will still not be able to support this reform,” Rubio said. “But I hope
you will understand that I honestly believe it is the right thing for
our country. To finally have an immigration system that works, to
finally have a fence, more agents and E-Verify, and to finally put an
end to de facto amnesty.”
. . .http://www.salon.com/2016/02/16/marco_rubios_immigration_fog_his_stance_on_his_own_reform_legislation_is_impossible_to_discern/

36.Immigrants Are Assets For Innovation
By Vijay K. Mathur
Huffington Post, February 15, 2016
. . .
In this blog I discuss the impact of immigrants on innovation and
productivity. Immigrants are self-selected people. In general, in free
societies like the US, where there is opportunity and encouragement for
individual achievement, immigrants are willing to take risks by moving
to a different country with different cultural, economic, political,
social and institutional environments with uncertain future prospects
for economic survival and success. However, the attitude toward risk
taking is an essential ingredient for innovations.

Research by Peter Moser et al., American Economic Review, 104(10), 2014,
shows that Jewish émigré scientists, who were forced out of their
professions by Nazi Germany, revolutionized US innovations. Moser finds
that "US inventions increased by 31 percent after 1933 in fields of
German émigrés." This inventive activity, evidenced by patent activity
in chemical fields, increased not only due to entry of new researchers
in the fields of émigrés but also due to research collaborations with
the émigrés. This spillover effect affirms other research on human
capital. Innovations provide a fertile ground for jobs creation and
employment opportunities.
. . .http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vijay-k-mathur/immigrants-are-assets-for-innovation_b_9228290.html

This all-or-nothing approach simply doesn't work in Washington, and
Sanders acknowledges as much on his site. While he pledges to act
unilaterally to prevent the deportation of relatives of citizens and
lawful permanent residents, the rest of those in the country illegally
will have to wait for the "political revolution" needed to pass
legislation giving them a path to citizenship. Good luck with pulling
that off in the majority of state legislatures that Republicans control
today and are likely to control for years because they hold the power to
draw congressional districts.
. . .http://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-ol-bernie-sanders-immigration-uncompromising-20160212-story.html

38.Mrs. Clinton’s Mixed Immigration Message
The New York Times, February 12, 2016

In Thursday night’s Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton defended her past
statements that Central American migrant children needed to be sent
home from the border to “send a message” to other families: Don’t come.

Wrong answer — which Bernie Sanders immediately pointed out.
. . .
Over the years, Mrs. Clinton has shown an unfortunate tendency to
oscillate between harshness and compassion on immigration questions. She
seems to reach instinctively for the tougher-sounding policy before
coming around, eventually, to positions that more closely reflect
American ideals of welcome — ideals that Mr. Sanders voiced fluently on
Thursday night.
. . .http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/opinion/mrs-clintons-mixed-immigration-message.html

39.Pope Francis Joins the 2016 Race at Key Time
By Elizabeth Dias
Time.com, February 18, 2016
. . .
Pope Francis’ words inject sharp focus about immigration into the
presidential campaign, but his critique is larger than Trump. The pope
called out any politician who aims to build walls not bridges, which
would implicate other GOP presidential candidates such as Texas Sen. Ted
Cruz. His words force all the candidates, especially Republicans, to
take note of his broader perspective on immigration.
. . .http://time.com/4229473/pope-francis-donald-trump-analysis/

40.A Little Reality on Immigration
By David Brooks
The New York Times, February 19, 2016
. . .
There are more Mexicans leaving the United States than coming in.
According to the Pew Research Center, there was a net outflow of 140,000
from 2009 to 2014. If Trump builds his wall, he’ll lock more Mexican
immigrants in than he’ll keep out.

Trump plays up the alleged threat of crime committed by immigrants. But
the overall evidence is clear. Immigrants make American streets safer.
Roughly 1.6 percent of immigrant males between ages 18 and 39 wind up
incarcerated, compared with 3.3 percent of native-born American men of
the same age. Among native-born men without a high school diploma, about
11 percent are incarcerated. Among similarly educated Mexican,
Guatemalan and Salvadoran men here, only 2 or 3 percent get
incarcerated.

One study of 103 cities between 1994 and 2004 found that violent crime
rates decreased as the concentration of immigrants increased. Numerous
studies have shown that a big share of the drop in crime rates in the
1990s is a result of the surge in immigration.

Trump plays up the threat of terrorism. But the real threat is that our
border agencies spend so much time tracking down people who want to be
gardeners that they don’t have the resources to track down the people
who want to be suicide bombers. Fighting terrorism by going after the
whole swath of immigration policy is like fighting germs with a
sledgehammer.
. . .http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/opinion/a-little-reality-on-immigration.html

Mr. Trump called it “disgraceful” to have his faith questioned this way.
Characteristically, he also took the occasion to double down on his
complaints about Mexican emigration to the U.S., and he fired back that
if the Vatican is attacked by Islamic State, the pope would have “wished
and prayed” Mr. Trump had been President.

But he’s right on the main point: Pope Francis was wrong—on many
levels—to question Mr. Trump’s Christianity. To start with, Americans
naturally resent a foreign leader who uses his office to introduce a
religious test into American politics. We say this even though on the
substance of immigration and

“Behind the orgy of profit-making and stock speculation sustained by
the policies of the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve, broad
masses of the American people remain in the grip of the deepest social
crisis since the Great Depression.”

Pat Buchanan:

Pope’s Trump Statement ‘Terrible Mistake,’ ‘Element of Anti-Americanism’ In His Political Statements

Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan stated that the statement
about Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump by Pope Francis
“was a terrible mistake” and that the Pope’s statements on politics have
“an element of anti-Americanism in there … anti-capitalism” on Friday’s
“McLaughlin Group.”

Buchanan said the pope is “He’s anti-capitalist, politically. He’s
not speaking as…pope on faith and morals. He engages in politics, and
when he does, there’s an element of anti-Americanism in there, if you
will, anti-capitalism, and to come out and intrude into an American
election, was a terrible mistake on his part, I think. And I think that
Donald Trump should have answered him. I would not have used the term
‘disgraceful,’ but I think he should have answered him and just said,
‘Look, there’s Vatican walls around [the] Vatican. Every inner city in
Europe has walls.'”

“Behind the orgy of profit-making and stock speculation sustained by
the policies of the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve, broad
masses of the American people remain in the grip of the deepest social
crisis since the Great Depression.”

“Behind the orgy of profit-making and stock speculation sustained by
the policies of the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve, broad
masses of the American people remain in the grip of the deepest social
crisis since the Great Depression.”

Once again on Sanders and socialism

20 February 2016

At a town hall event Thursday night in Las Vegas, jointly hosted by
the MSNBC cable channel and Telemundo, Democratic presidential
candidate and self-described “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders was
asked by one of the moderators to explain what he meant by socialism.

Sanders
has attracted broad support from working people and youth by basing his
bid for the White House on denunciations of social inequality and the
political domination and criminality of Wall Street. His claim to be a
socialist, far from alienating many workers and youth, has attracted
them to his campaign, an indication of the growth of anti-capitalist
sentiment. According to one prominent poll released on Friday, he trails
former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton nationally among Democratic
voters by only 3 percentage points.

In reply to the question about
socialism, Sanders said: “When I talk about democratic socialist, you
know what I’m talking about? Social Security, one of the most popular
and important programs in this country, developed by FDR to give dignity
and security to seniors… When I talk about democratic socialist, I am
talking about Medicare, a single payer care system for the elderly. And
in my view, we should expand that concept to all people…

“When I
talk about democratic socialist, I’m not looking at Venezuela. I’m not
looking at Cuba. I’m looking at countries like Denmark and Sweden…”

This
response bears careful scrutiny. It makes clear that, despite his talk
of a “political revolution” against the “billionaire class,” Sanders is
not an opponent of the capitalist system or the two-party political
monopoly through which the American corporate-financial elite has ruled
for more than 150 years.

There is nothing anti-capitalist in
Sanders’ so-called “socialism.” Socialism is not a reform of capitalism,
it is its opposite. It is based on the abolition of private ownership
of the means of production—the major industries, transport,
telecommunications, banking—and their transformation into public
utilities under the democratic control of the working people. It
replaces production for private profit based on the surplus value
extracted through the exploitation of workers under the wage system with
production for the benefit of society as a whole. It supersedes the
anarchy of the market by organizing economic life on the basis of
rational planning.

It overcomes the contradiction between
globalized production and the nation-state political framework of
capitalism by uniting workers internationally in the struggle for a
world socialist federation. It is a revolutionary change that can be
achieved only through the independent political mobilization of the
working class and the establishment of a workers’ government.

Sanders
opposes all of this. He contends, in the name of “socialism,” that the
existing economic and political set-up can be reformed along the lines
of the programs that were instituted in the 1930s (Social Security) and
the 1960s (Medicare). Neither of these programs, while representing
significant gains for working people, challenged the basic class
interests of the American ruling elite. Precisely because the economic
and political power of the ruling class was left intact, these programs
have been under constant attack. They have been increasingly whittled
down and are now targeted for extinction.

Where, moreover, did
these programs come from? They were not the result of the beneficence of
the American capitalist class. They were wrenched from the ruling elite
in the course of bitter and bloody struggles of not only the American,
but also the international working class. The most important factor
behind the enactment of the social reforms of the 1930s and 1960s in
America was the socialist revolution of 1917 that established in Russia
the first workers’ state in world history.

That world-transforming
event provided a mighty impulse to the struggles of workers in the US
and around the world, and it inspired in the ruling classes of every
capitalist country fear of something similar happening to them. The
outbreak of the Great Depression in 1929 discredited capitalism in the
eyes of millions in the US and internationally and fueled a growth of
class struggle that erupted in general strikes in three major American
cities—Toledo, San Francisco and Minneapolis—in 1934.
This was the
context in which Franklin D. Roosevelt, a resolute defender of the
capitalist system and the interests of the American ruling class, felt
compelled to implement a series of social reforms, including Social
Security, whose basic purpose was to avert social revolution in the
United States.
The next major social reforms, Medicare and
Medicaid, the government health programs for the elderly and the poor,
were enacted under conditions of rising social struggles and mounting
political discontent. This was the period of the mass civil rights
movement, which was, in essence, an extension of the class battles that
gave rise to the industrial unions in the 1930s, and which was animated
by an egalitarian ethos. It coincided with anti-colonial struggles that
shook Asia and Africa. It was accompanied by urban rebellions that swept
America’s cities, militant strikes of industrial workers and the first
stirrings of the anti-war movement.

But even at the height of its
global economic dominance and political influence, American capitalism
was unable to overcome endemic poverty, unemployment and oppression. In
1964, Lyndon Johnson proclaimed his “War on Poverty,” but that quickly
collapsed as American capitalism was overtaken by its international and
internal contradictions. Since then, the Democratic Party and the ruling
class as a whole have shifted ever more violently to the right,
abandoning any policy of liberal reform.
The past 30 years have
been dominated by a relentless ruling class offensive against the
working class, which has been escalated, under the Obama administration,
in the aftermath of the capitalist breakdown of 2008. Sanders often
notes that in America today, the richest 20 individuals own more wealth
than the bottom 50 percent of the population—more than 150 million
people. Yet he embraces and praises the president who has overseen the
greatest transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich in
history.

As he said Thursday night, “Bottom line is, I happen to
think that the president has done an extraordinarily good job. I have
worked with him on issue after issue.”

In recent days, pro-Clinton
economists such as Paul Krugman and Jared Bernstein have attacked
Sanders’ reform proposals, including free tuition at public colleges and
universal government-provided health care, as wildly impractical and
unrealizable. This is an attack on Sanders from the right, based on the
standard lie that “there is no money” for social programs. However,
Krugman and the others are correct in one critical regard. Sanders, no
less than his pro-Clinton critics, accepts and defends the existing
economic system. Proceeding from that starting point, his reform
proposals are indeed utopian.

Outside of a mass struggle that
directly challenges the bases of capitalist rule no genuinely
progressive changes can be achieved.

As for Sanders’ supposedly
“socialist” models—Denmark and Sweden—both have for the past two decades
been busy dismantling the welfare states established after World War II
and imposing ever harsher austerity measures on the working class.
Their turn to social and political reaction is exemplified by their
savage attacks on refugees. Sweden last month announced it would expel
some 80,000 people fleeing the imperialist wars in the Middle East, and
Denmark announced plans to seize the assets of asylum seekers.

Sanders
does not represent the growing opposition of the working class to
inequality, war and repression. He does not articulate the growth of
anti-capitalist sentiment among the masses. He represents a response by
the ruling class to these developments. His central political function
is to prevent the emergence of an independent political movement of the
working class by channeling social discontent back behind the Democratic
Party.

Maybe we millennials should rethink socialism

If
you ever find yourself driving through southeast Kansas, there is a
small town tucked away off U.S. Route 169 that you might like. Its
appearance and culture is one of quiet tradition, boasting no flashy
distinctiveness. While it has a library, a safari museum, a few parks,
and a cement factory, the town of Chanute, in all its aura of classic
Americana, is pretty much your average Kansas small town. Like any
small town, Chanute is home to a variety of rich life stories. One of
those stories is about a man I knew named Pat.

Other
than a handful of classes at the local community college, Pat’s formal
schooling stopped after high school. He earned his first job at the age
of fourteen sweeping floors at Caldwell Floor Covering, a modest carpet
store located on West Cherry Street. As time progressed, he learned
how to lay carpet, ceramic, hardwood, laminate, and vinyl. After a
brief period in the National Guard, Pat returned to Caldwell, where his
burgeoning reputation of trust and reliability earned him the
responsibility of managing the store’s books. Fifty-six years later, he
would retire from Caldwell as the owner.

Outside
work, he and his wife, Billie Maxine, a nurse, raised a family. In
1972, the couple and their three sons (and later, a daughter) moved into
a tiny two-bedroom house on a ten-acre hog farm. The scene was hardly
picturesque: incessant grazing had stripped the pasture of vegetation,
and the house was in a severe state of disrepair, complete with its own
mice and roach infestation.

But
to Pat and Billie, this despondent parcel of land was an opportunity.
Embracing a work ethic forged in their own upbringing, they repaired the
house, dug a pond, and planted grass. To make ends meet, they
cultivated a large vegetable garden and raised chickens, cattle, and
swine for the family's consumption. Although progress was slow, it was
steady; as the years passed, Pat and Billie claimed their piece of the
American Dream and built a happy life for their children.

In
December 2015, the Washington Post reported that forty-eight percent of
my generation (millennials) believe that the American Dream is dead.
It is not a crazy belief – given the effects of wage stagnation, student
debt, and a shrinking middle class, it is unsurprising the traditional
benchmarks of adulthood, like getting married and buying a home, appear
so far out of reach for millennials. It seems whenever our ostensibly
bleak economic prospects are coupled with our teetering ability to gain
the much-needed approval of older generations, we cannot help but view
our futures so dubiously. Perhaps this is why millennials are the most
medicated, depressed, and anxious generation in recent history.

So what should we millennials do about it?

On
the one hand, we could brand ourselves "democratic socialists," blame
our parents, scorn corporations, and deride capitalism. We could wallow
in our apparent inability to thrive absent taxpayer-backed college,
health care, minimum wages, and "safe zones." We could avoid building
resilience, cling fervently to the questionable precept of
intersectionality, and hand off to our children a gargantuan expansion
of the national debt and federal bureaucracy.Then
again, we could acknowledge that economic mobility is no worse than it
was fifty years ago and that no generation in history was as ideally
situated to realize the American Dream as we are. We could take a page
out of Pat’s and Billie’s book, rethink what opportunity means, and
perhaps find the personal satisfaction we crave by building something
from nothing, rather than chasing down the increasingly hollow
credentials of "achievement" that seem to define our generation.

Indeed,
we could live up to our reputation of "everybody gets a trophy," or we
could find our own hog farm, roll up our sleeves, and discover a prize
truly reflective of what we have earned.I hope we make the right call.Thomas
Wheatley is a law student at George Mason University School of Law in
Arlington, Virginia. Email him at twheatl2@gmu.edu.

(CNSNews.com) --
Although the national unemployment rate in January was 4.9%, a broader
measure used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), called U-6, which
includes total unemployed, persons marginally attached to the labor
force, and those working part-time for economic reasons, shows that the unemployment rate was 9.9% in January 2016.
That
9.9% unemployment rate, seasonally adjusted, was the same in December
and November 2015, and up slightly from October, when it was 9.8%.
In January 2015, a year ago, the U-6 unemployment rate was 11.3%.
Prior
to October 2015, the last time the U-6 unemployment rate was in the
9.8-9.9% range was in May and June 2008, seven months before Barack
Obama was inaugurated president.

Source: Gallup and Bureau of Labor Statistics.

When
Obama entered office in January 2009, the U-6 unemployment rate was
14.2%. It's peak was in late 2009, early 2010, when it hit 17.1%
unemployment for several months.

The Gallup polling company calls the U-6 number the "Real Unemployment" rate
in America. As it states, "Widely reported unemployment metrics in the
U.S. do not accurately represent the reality of joblessness in
America."

"For
example, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does not count a
person who desires work as unemployed if he or she is not working and
has stopped looking for work over the past four weeks," says
Gallup. "Similarly, the BLS does not count someone as unemployed if he
or she is, for instance, an out-of-work engineer, construction worker or
retail manager who performs a minimum of one hour of work a week and
receives at least $20 in compensation."

The
Unaccompanied Children Crisis: Does the Administration Have a Plan to
Stop the Border Surge and Adequately Monitor the Children?

Kevin writes that it’s a mystery to him “that conservatives are so
miserable at the moment, when they are presented with such a desirable
choice” between Cruz and Rubio. Let me explain.

There’s no doubt that both “are self-conscious conservatives in the
sense that they are products of the conservative movement,” as Kevin
says, “in a way that no president has been since Ronald Reagan.” I’ll
even concede that Rubio got into bed with Schumer because he was
auditioning for the job of Republican We Can Do Business With, a
deal-maker who can get things done, and a deal on immigration seemed
like a good place to start.

But there are two factors that might help resolve Kevin’s mystery.
First, as I argue on the homepage today, immigration is not just another
issue. It impacts every aspect of policy, and is irreversible. Angela
Merkel’s conservative bona fides are irrelevant next to the damage she
has done to her country. If Rubio were to change his tune on immigration
after winning the election (as he’s done after winning every previous
election), nothing else he did would matter.

And the chances of that happening are greater than Kevin thinks. He
writes that, “our hypothetical President Rubio is never going to sign
that amnesty bill because Congress isn’t ever going to send it to him.”
He could be right – If Rubio wins, I certainly hope that’s the way it
would play out. But the House has different leadership than in 2013.
While John Boehner was basically in favor of a Gang of Eight-style
policy of amnesty for illegals and massive expansion of legal
immigration, he wasn’t an ideologically committed supporter of unlimited
immigration like Paul Ryan. Remember, in 2013-2014, Ryan worked with
Luis Gutierrez to pass a version of the Senate bill, just as Rubio had
worked with Schumer. With Ryan as Speaker and Rubio in the White House,
the odds that they’d try again are greater than we should be comfortable
with, especially when the anti-borders interests would take a Rubio
victory as proof that you can push amnesty and increased immigration and
live to tell about it.

This notion that Marco Rubio doesn’t know what he’s doing is just not true.

Eagle Forum has published a memo detailing Marco Rubio’s lies to
conservatives in his effort to get Chuck Schumer’s immigration bill
passed. “Lies” is a strong word, but it’s the only word that fits. This
wasn’t the natural trimming of politicians, like Rubio’s justification
of sugar subsidies in the service of his financial patrons the Fanjul
brothers. From Cicero to Reagan, all successful politicians engage in
misdirection or exploit ambiguity (including all the other current
Republican hopefuls). In this case, though, Rubio led a Clintonian
campaign of calculated falsehoods designed to sell Schumer’s Gang of
Eight bill to conservatives.

Those falsehoods are too numerous to list in a blog post – read the
whole paper. But some examples regarding just one part of the bill: As
Rubio himself was forced to admit eventually, Schumer’s bill granted
work permits and Social Security numbers to illegals up front, and
promised the enforcement targets would be met in future years – just
like the failed 1986 amnesty. And yet, here’s what he told conservative
media:

To Limbaugh: “if there is not language in this bill that guarantees that
nothing else will happen unless these enforcement mechanisms are in
place, I won’t support it.”

To Hannity: “I don’t think any of that [amnesty] begins until we certify
that the border security progress has been real. That a workplace
enforcement mechanism is in place. That we are tracking visitors to our
country, especially when they exit.”

Bill O’Reilly said: “Senator Rubio told me on the phone today that it
would be at least 13 years, 13, before people in the country illegally
right now could gain full legal working status and even longer to
achieve citizenship.”

Rubio also lied about the size of the bill’s unprecedented increase in
legal immigration, he lied about the scope of waivers, he lied about
welfare eligibility, he lied to law enforcement about amnesty for gang
members.

Disagreement over policy is one thing; Jeb’s immigration views, for
instance, are not shared by most of the people whose votes he’s seeking,
but he’s honorably forthright about what he believes. Rubio, on the
other hand, tried to trick his own partisans. I had actually forgotten
the scope of his dishonesty in pushing Schumer’s bill; Eagle Forum has
done a service by collecting it all in one place. And Rubio has never
apologized for it. Maybe someone will bring it up at tonight’s debate.

Immigration isn’t just another issue. Despite his “does not compute”
glitch Saturday night (which will likely dog him for the rest of his
career, like Rick Perry’s “oops” and Dan Quayle’s “you’re no Jack
Kennedy” moment), Marco Rubio is still a live contender for the
nomination. So it remains important to explain why I think his
immigration record disqualifies him from being the 2016 nominee.

Many conservatives who admire Rubio’s genuine political talent agree
that his shilling for Chuck Schumer’s Gang of Eight bill was bad. But
they offer two reasons that this should not be an impediment to his
being the Republican presidential nominee. First, they say, Rubio has
learned his lesson and, second, he’s quite solid on many other issues.
Both parts of this defense warrant examination: Has Rubio truly changed
his spots on immigration? And is immigration simply one issue among
many, so that Rubio’s deviation there is outweighed by his fidelity on
others?

As to the first question: There’s every reason to suspect Rubio is
merely an election-year immigration hawk. A devastating 14-page
indictment of Rubio’s immigration record, prepared by Eagle Forum (html
and pdf), lays out his duplicity in painful detail. Early in his career,
anti-borders groups were delighted with Rubio’s conduct in the Florida
legislature; the head of one of them, NALEO, said, “He, as speaker, kept
many of those [immigration-control bills] from coming up to a vote. We
were very proud of his work as speaker of the House.”

Then, when Rubio ran for the Senate, he turned into a hawk. As CNN’s
greatest-hits clip at last month’s debate showed, Rubio said the
following, among other things, during his 2010 campaign: “Earned path to
citizenship is basically code for amnesty, it’s what they call it. . . .
It is unfair to people who have legally entered this country to create
an alternative pathway for individuals who entered illegally and
knowingly did so.” This hawkishness on immigration was an important
reason for his upset victory over Charlie Crist.

“Once he got elected, he betrayed us all,” according to Phyllis
Schlafly, Rubio’s first major outside endorser in the Senate primary.
Rubio chose to become the chief salesman and public face of Chuck
Schumer’s Gang of Eight bill and, as the Eagle Forum indictment shows,
his mendacity went well beyond embracing the amnesty he’d so recently
denounced: It included a calculated effort to dupe conservatives about
what was really in the bill. It was so bad that the head of the ICE
agents’ association said that “he directly misled law-enforcement
officers” at a meeting right before the bill was introduced in the
Senate.

Then, when the voters rebelled at Senate passage of his monstrous bill
and the House refused to pass it, Rubio denounced his own bill, saying
the public doesn’t trust Washington to follow through on its enforcement
promises. (Of course, this was apparent to anyone with eyes to see and
ears to hear, not just in 2013 but even in 2007, when Bush’s amnesty
push failed.)

To sum up: Rubio was anti-enforcement in the Florida legislature, then
an enforcement hawk at election time in 2010, then Schumer’s cabana boy
in 2013, then a hawk again at election time. Anyone can flip once —
people really do change their minds, or even see political writing on
the wall and embrace a new position. But flipping and flopping in time
with the election cycle should be cause for skepticism, to say the
least.

And Rubio hasn’t even really renounced Schumer’s bill. He still supports
all the parts of it, but thinks they should be passed separately rather
than in a comprehensive package. And he is still an enthusiastic
supporter of the most important piece of the Schumer-Rubio legislation —
its doubling of legal immigration, from 1 million a year to 2 million,
which, combined with the amnesty, would have resulted in the issuance of
30 million green cards in the first decade after passage.

Not only has Rubio not recanted his support for doubling immigration,
he’s actually sponsored a bill in this Congress to triple H-1B
admissions of foreign workers (the I-Squared Act — which Michelle Malkin
has cheekily labeled Rubio’s second-worst immigration bill). What’s
more, personnel is policy, and Rubio’s inner circle — pollster Whit
Ayres, for instance, and Cesar Conda, his chief of staff during the
Schumer romance and likely White House chief of staff — are confirmed
opponents of immigration limits. The idea that the open-borders
corporate culture of the Rubio operation would be trumped by some
enforcement promises made on the campaign trail is a fantasy.

But even supposing all this is true, Rubio is sound on many other issues
— his answer on the abortion issue Saturday night, for instance, was
very strong and, while he’s a little too interventionist for my taste,
he’s firmly in the GOP mainstream and probably more knowledgeable on
foreign policy than his rivals. Since no candidate is perfect, isn’t
focusing so intently on immigration an unrealistic demand for purity?
After all, Rubio’s opportunistic embrace of sugar subsidies, at the
behest of a major donor, is the kind of soiled compromise we often
accept.

But immigration isn’t just another issue, like farm subsidies or taxes
or even battling radical Islam. Immigration is a meta issue, one that
affects almost every arena of national life — from politics to education
to jobs to security to health care to national cohesion. If we set
taxes too high, we can lower them later. If we let the Navy get too
small, we build more ships. But if we get immigration wrong, we can’t
undo it: People are not widgets, and we can’t ask for a do-over after
adding 30 million green cards in a decade.

What’s more, the deep gulf in views over immigration between elites and
the public, between globalists and patriots, has given immigration a
symbolic importance as a marker of legitimacy. As Ramesh Ponnuru has
written, “A hard line on immigration, however it is defined, is now part
of the conservative creed.”

In effect, Rubio is an Angela Merkel Republican — genuinely conservative
on most every issue, except the one that counts above all others.

For this reason alone, he should be denied the nomination. If he were to
succeed in getting it, the donor class and its politicians would take
away the lesson that they can betray the voters all they want on this
potentially nation-breaking issue, and simply talk their way out of it.
Voltaire wrote, in Candide, that “it is good to kill an admiral from
time to time, in order to encourage the others.” Rubio’s betrayal
doesn’t warrant the gallows, but he must be denied this prize, “in order
to encourage the others.”

This doesn’t mean he’s finished in politics. He’s a young man with
immense political gifts and has plenty of time before 2020 or 2024 to
atone in Congress for his transgressions and earn back the people’s
trust. If he were to run for governor of Florida, for instance, he could
amass a record of fidelity to immigration law by, say, passing
mandatory E-Verify for his state. Even before then, during the remainder
of his Senate term, he could work with Jeff Sessions to introduce
legislation to end chain migration and abolish the Visa Lottery — or, at
the very least, withdraw his sponsorship of the anti–American-worker
I-Squared H-1B bill.

If Marco Rubio can convincingly turn away from his Merkelian past, he
can have a bright future, perhaps even become the 46th or 47th president
of the United States. But to nominate him in 2016 would be a profound
mistake.

4.Where Does United States v. Texas Stand after Scalia's Death?
By Jon Feere
CIS Immigration Blog, February 14, 2016
. . .
If United States v. Texas results a 4-4 split decision, it
means that the lower court holding stands and President Obama's
unilateral amnesty remains enjoined. Critical to this analysis, any
opinion issued by the Supreme Court would not be precedent-setting.
(It would also likely be quite short. For example, in a 4-4 case from
2010, the Court simply wrote: "The judgment is affirmed by an equally
divided Court.")

What is unique in this situation is that the lower court's holding is in
the injunction phase – a full trial on the merits of DAPA and the
states' interests has not been held. This means that if the Supreme
Court were to split evenly, a hearing on the merits of the case is still
likely to be held at some point in the future by the lower court. At
some point after that, it is possible that the case would get appealed
back up to the Supreme Court. This would presumably happen after a new
justice has been appointed and after a new president has been elected.

What's interesting about this is that if the Obama administration hadn't
pressured the Court to take up the case, it could have slipped to the
next term and perhaps the immigration case would not be on everyone's
radar to the extent that it is now, making it easier for the president
to persuade Congress to allow him to appoint a new justice later this
year. It would be much more preferable from the administration's
perspective to appoint a new justice before the immigration case is
decided.
. . .http://www.cis.org/feere/where-does-united-states-v-texas-stand-after-scalias-death

5.Criminal Alien Assistance Funds: Wanting Your Cake and Eating It Too
By Dan Cadman
CIS Immigration Blog, February 12, 2016
. . .
But one can understand congressional interest in creating favor with
politically savvy and powerful law enforcement officials throughout the
country, such as county sheriffs and major city police chiefs, by
establishing an atmosphere of good will and cooperation between law
enforcement agencies nationwide and federal immigration agents charged
with finding and removing alien criminals.

The problem is that recalcitrant state legislatures and city and county
councils have erected barriers to such cooperation. Likewise, many
sheriffs and police chiefs have adopted rules that render the jobs of
federal agents much more difficult by refusing to honor immigration
detainers and declining to notify agents of arrests or the release dates
of aliens. This "sanctuary city" movement (which includes counties and
states along with cities), having gone unchecked by the administration,
has experienced mushroom-like growth — especially since the
administration itself has unilaterally created policy barriers by
narrowly defining when agents may even file such detainers. Not to
mention the litigiousness of open-borders groups that have sued state
and local law enforcement organizations for honoring the detainers
(suits which, as often as not, the federal government has run from,
leaving their enforcement "partners" to fend for themselves).

Still, there is something unconscionable about holding out one hand for
federal money and using the other to stiff-arm federal immigration
agents trying to do their job. Such is the case with California, which
even as it receives tens of millions of dollars in SCAAP money, has
enacted into law the "Trust Act", a statute prohibiting both state and
local California agencies from fully cooperating with immigration agents
or honoring detainers. This has on more than one occasion led to
unnecessary deaths (see here, here, and here). Yet, amusingly, a
California spokesman is quoted as lamenting the potential loss of money
because of the serious impact it will have on his state, and talking
about the number of alien inmates with detainers filed against them. One
wonders how many would, in the end, actually be honored, and how many
were rejected out of hand in the first place.
. . .http://www.cis.org/cadman/criminal-alien-assistance-funds-wanting-your-cake-and-eating-it-too

6."We Might as Well Abolish Our Immigration Laws"
By Dan Cadman
CIS Immigration Blog, February 8, 2016
. . .
I mentioned two ways in which this ultimate dismantling might come
about. One involved stacking the deck of key appointments, such as
enlarging the bench of immigration judges with individuals who share the
president's open borders outlook. That has been happening in earnest,
and as one can see from a cursory glance at the official website of the
Executive Office for Immigration Review, it includes not just
rank-and-file judges, but also a slew of six new assistant chief
immigration judges who will ride herd over the others. Can anyone doubt
their philosophical proclivities?

The other way involves continuing to mandate executive actions that
crush even the semblance of immigration law enforcement. This most
recent directive to the Border Patrol certainly meets that test. And it
is not the only one. The administration has also directed that aerial
surveillance of our borders be cut in half. This is incredible at a time
when ISIS terrorists have threatened to infiltrate the United States by
any means necessary. One suspects that they care little about that
fight, though, since they have shown no will for it to date, and since
it will become the inheritance of the next president. It takes little
imagination to gauge that the reasons for the cut are twofold: First, to
permit the flooding of our borders with citizens from our southern
neighbors in a way that they believe, or at least hope, will force the
issue of a future broad-based amnesty. Second, and more prosaically, to
minimize the possibility that there will be a leak of aerial
surveillance videos that reveal exactly how damaging the new rules of
engagement for Patrol Agents are by showing footage of large numbers of
aliens crossing the border with impunity and indifference to the
possibility of apprehension.
. . .http://www.cis.org/cadman/we-might-well-abolish-our-immigration-laws

7.DHS OIG Issues a "No Recommendation" Audit Report — Or Does it?
By Dan Cadman
CIS Immigration Blog, February 8, 2016
. . .
As one can easily see, the left column, highlighted in blue, says, "What
We Recommend: We made one recommendation to CBP to develop and
implement a process to determine program costs for the SOG."

The text immediately to the right of the blue says, "We made no
recommendation regarding the lack of formal performance measures in the
SOG program [but that] CBP concurred with our recommendation. The
recommendation is resolved and open."

8.A Look at the New Center for Migration Studies Illegal Population Estimates
By Steven A. Camarota
CIS Immigration Blog, February 8, 2016
. . .
One of the biggest problems with the CMS report is the way the findings
are presented. The headline and the accompanying article emphasize a
"continued" decline in the illegal population. But this conclusion is
not supported by data they present. The illegal estimates from CMS are
based on the public-use file of the American Community Survey, and like
any survey it has a margin of error. Although CMS does not provide it,
for a population of 10.9 million illegal immigrants drawn from the
public-use file of the ACS, the margin of error must be a little over
100,000. We can estimate the margin of error for the illegal population
by using the total foreign-born Mexican population in the 2014 ACS as a
proxy population. In 2014 the ACS showed 11.7 million Mexican
immigrants, with a margin of error of ±110,000. If we simply use the
same procedure for calculating the margin of error for an illegal
population of 10.9 million, the margin of error would be ±106,000 for
2014. This assumes a 90 percent confidence level. If we assume a 95
percent confidence level the margin of error is +/- 127,000. The illegal
population is very similar in characteristics to the overall Mexican
immigrant population so the confidence interval would have to be nearly
identical.
. . .http://www.cis.org/camarota/center-migration-studies-report-falls-short

9.The House Presents a Sprightly Hearing on EB-5
By David North
CIS Immigration Blog, February 12, 2016

The full House Judiciary Committee produced a lively and often
stimulating hearing on the immigrant investor (EB-5) program yesterday.
. . .
TApparently the government has had, for 25 years, the power to raise the
minimum investment, but never used it, even as inflation climbed.

Colucci said that the administration was thinking about it.

Several people said that the half-million/one-million differential was
supposed to channel funds into depressed rural and urban areas, but that
EB-5 promoters had through gerrymandering managed to distort the
program into its current shape. Then in one of those moments we
sometimes see in these hearings, witness Calderon pointed out something
that had been forgotten for decades.

She said that "in footnote six of my paper there is a reference to a
third level of investment in the 1990 act, and it calls for a minimum
stake of $3 million" for an investment in a really prosperous area. She
was arguing for a sliding scale of investment to help depressed areas.

At about this point, witness Gordon said, in response to a question
about how to break the strangle-hold of affluent urban areas, that a new
and vigorous use of differential rewards (with higher ones for
investments in poor areas) could change the current patterns, but only
if the government made that a priority.

Calderon had another interesting observation. There are something like
63,000 visas backlogged in the program because there are more
applications on hand than can be filled within the annual ceiling of
10,000. The backlog has been worsened due to the fact that there usually
are about 2.5 visas per investment, and also by the heavy use (87
percent) of the program by Chinese nationals. The Chinese usage has
bumped into another provision of the law setting overall migration
ceilings on aliens from individual nations.

10.Strategic Objective Is Questionable, but Tactics Are Attractive
By David North
CIS Immigration Blog, February 11, 2016
. . .
Yesterday's Immigration Daily featured a brief article by "Dino
Palangic et. al." to which is attached an Excel spreadsheet that
enables immigration attorneys use eye-catching graphics to support their
petitions for either nonimmigrant treaty investors (E-2) or immigrant
investors (EB-5).

11.What Money Can and Can't Buy in Our Immigration System
By David North
CIS Immigration Blog, February 10, 2016
. . .
E visas are nonimmigrant ones and do not, in and of themselves, lead to a green card.

As an aside, my caller said that one of the reasons why there are so
many small Korean retail establishments is that a migrant with $100,000
to $200,000 can buy a retail establishment and thus qualify for an E-2
visa. This is another way to buy your way into the country, but not
permanently.

12.Most of the Gains from Immigration Go to Immigrants Themselves – Not to Natives
By Jason Richwine
CIS Immigration Blog, February 10, 2016

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal featured a reasonably balanced
look at the economic effects of Arizona's crackdown on illegal
immigrants. The state has enjoyed a 40 percent decline in its illegal
population since it mandated E-Verify and empowered local police to
check immigration status during traffic stops. (Because Arizona's
decline is larger than in surrounding states, we may plausibly attribute
it to the new policies.) The Journal points out that fewer illegal
immigrants has meant less overall economic output for Arizona, but also
higher wages in some sectors and less of a financial strain on schools
and hospitals.

Sorting through these different effects can be tricky, and it tripped up
even Kevin Drum, a sharp-minded liberal blogger for Mother Jones.
Reacting to the Journal piece, Drum noted that Arizona's annual GDP is
$6 billion lower because of the new policies, whereas schools and
hospitals are saving only $410 million. "Arizona is paying a high price
for cracking down on illegal immigration," Drum concluded.

13.The Ideological Divide on Immigration: Prevention vs. Protection
By Jerry Kammer
CIS Immigration Blog, February 7, 2016
. . .
South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy, the immigration subcommittee
chairman, charged the Obama administration with failure to manage the
crisis. He pointed to reports that migrants had told Border Patrol
agents they came north because they had heard that if they made it
across the border they would be allowed to stay in the country.

"In other words, no adequate steps have been taken to halt the surge or
discourage aliens from attempting to enter the United States," Gowdy
said. "We must at some point send a clear message to potential unlawful
immigrants" that they will not be allowed to stay in the United States.

In response to Gowdy's call for tough-minded resolve, Michigan Democrat
John Conyers called for big-hearted compassion. Said Conyers: "People
need to live free from an endless cycle of violence and persecution. ...
We must address the root causes of the hemisphere crisis. ... We have a
moral as well as a legal obligation to provide asylum seekers the
opportunity to apply for humanitarian protection."

Thirty years ago Democrats and Republicans managed to bridge the much
narrower ideological divide of that era. Congress passed and President
Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, calling it a
solution to illegal immigration. IRCA was built on a hard-won compromise
that promised to combine protection in the form of amnesty with
prevention in the form of worksite enforcement.
. . .http://www.cis.org/kammer/ideological-divide-prevention-vs-protection

14.Attention Syrian Refugees: U.S. Is Looking into Your Facebook Accounts
By Nayla Rush
CIS Immigration Blog, February 12, 2016
. . .
Based on the following excerpts from the witness statements, here's the
deal. The U.S. government is going to hire more people, spend more
money, deploy more resources to vet more and more immigrants, asylum
seekers, and refugees (unaccompanied minors from Central America have
just been added to the list of people we "need" to bring in). And this,
despite the fact that the system is already backlogged, staff is
overwhelmed, and the budget is tight. As usual, it is the American
citizen and the legal immigrant who will pick up the tab in order to
keep up with this administration's overseas humanitarian enthusiasms.
. . .http://www.cis.org/rush/attention-syrian-refugees-us-looking-your-facebook-accounts

Last night, the Democratic debate in Milwaukee became the latest example
of the ill-informed immigration narrative propagated in the United
States and the lack of interest in enforcement of immigration law.

During the debate Sen. Bernie Sanders went after Hillary Clinton's vague
support for deporting some Central Americans, claiming she was willing
to deport "people who were fleeing drug violence and cartel violence,"
making an explicit reference to Honduras. Yet, violence is not the
principal reason Honduran are choosing to migrate.
. . .http://www.cis.org/luna/democrats-get-immigration-issue-wrong-again

16.Survey Shows Main Cause of Honduran Emigration Is Economics, Not Violence
By Kausha Luna
CIS Immigration Blog, February 9, 2016
. . .
Regarding migration, the survey confirmed the economic crisis in
Honduras as the main cause for migration. Of the respondents that had a
family member who had migrated in the last four years, 77.6 percent did
so due to lack of employment and a search for better opportunities.
Meanwhile, 16.9 percent migrated due to violence and insecurity. In
comparison, the 2014 ERIC-SJ survey showed that 82.5 percent migrated
for the former causes and 11 percent migrated for the latter. So while
violence and insecurity have grown in importance among causes for
migration, they continue to lag far behind economic factors as the
primary cause.

Homicide rates in Honduras have been decreasing since 2012.

However, the Obama administration's narrative insists that Central
Americans are fleeing violence and as such should be welcomed into the
United States with open arms as "refugees." This narrative ignores the
economy as the primary push factor for migration, as well as the pull of
incentives created by the Obama administration in its refusal to
enforce immigration laws.
. . .Return to Top

********
********

17.The Next Administration's Immigration Crisis
By Michael Cutler
FrontPagMag.com, February 8, 2016
. . .
While the politicians downplay the actual number of likely illegal
aliens they also never mention that if legalized, millions of illegal
aliens would have the right to immediately bring in their spouses and
minor children. Think of how many millions of additional aliens would
suddenly be admitted into the United States with lawful status- flooding
our educational and healthcare systems.

18.How to Fix Illegal Immigration in Five Steps Without Building a Wall
But we should build some walls too
By Kevin D. Williamson
National Review Online, February 9, 2016
. . .
No, not the question of immigration — illegal immigration.
There’s a temptation to bundle those together, because we have problems
with our legal immigration regime, too, but the more tightly we tie them
together, the more closely we bind ourselves to “solutions” that
aren’t. With illegal immigration, we won’t get 100 percent of the way
there with five reforms, but we might get 92 percent of the way there.

One: Enact a law that does one thing: prohibit people
who have entered the United States illegally from applying for
citizenship — even if their current status is legal. If you ever have
entered the United States illegally, you don’t ever become a citizen.

Two: Enact a law that does one thing: prohibit people
who have entered the United States illegally from applying for a work
permit — even if their current status is legal. If you ever have entered
the United Sates illegally, you don’t ever get a work permit.

That’s your firewall against amnesty. Vote against those laws, and
you’re voting for amnesty; vote to repeal them down the line, you’re
voting for amnesty. This creates good political incentives in Washington
and removes bad incentives among those who come here illegally
expecting that their status eventually will be made legal.
. . .http://www.nationalreview.com/article/431012/fixing-illegal-immigration-five-steps

19.U.S. Election Comm. Quietly Lets States Verify U.S. Citizenship
Judicial Watch Corruption Chronicles, February 12, 2016
. . .
Nevertheless, election officials in some states have confirmed that
requiring ID is not enough to prevent fraud. American citizenship,
mandatory to vote in U.S. elections at every level, must also be
verified. But first states must get approval from the feds, specifically
the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The bipartisan
commission is tasked with assuring that elections are administered in
accordance with federal laws. This includes accrediting voting system
test labs, certifying voting equipment and keeping a national mail voter
registration form.

For years the EAC has rejected requests from several states to allow the
citizenship verification of its registered voters. Judicial Watch has
been involved in several of the cases and years ago filed documents with
the EAC in support of efforts by Arizona, Kansas and Georgia to require
voter registration applicants to provide proof of citizenship. In its
filing with the EAC Judicial Watch writes that under Section 8 of the
National Voter Registration ACT (NVRA), states are under a federal
obligation to assure that non-citizens neither register nor vote. A
failure to allow states to require such information would undermine
Americans’ confidence that their elections are being conducted fairly
and honestly, and would thwart states’ ability to comply with the
election integrity obligations imposed by federal law.
. . .
In the last few weeks, however, the EAC has quietly reversed itself by
approving the petition of three states—Kansas, Georgia and Alabama—to
add a citizenship requirement to their voter registration forms. The
letters, signed by the EAC’s new executive director, Brian D. Newby,
were issued on January 29, 2016. They can be viewed here. The about-face
opens the door for other states seeking to preserve the integrity of
elections by requiring evidence of voter eligibility before ballots are
cast.
. . .http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/02/u-s-election-comm-quietly-lets-states-verify-u-s-citizenship/

It appears that the recent execution-style murder of a Massachusetts man
was committed by two Central American teens that came to the U.S. as
Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) under President Obama’s open border
free-for-all. Tens of thousands of illegal immigrant minors—mostly from
El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras—have entered the country through the
Mexican border since the influx began in the summer of 2014 and the
administration has relocated them nationwide.

News reports indicate that the 17-year-olds charged in the gruesome
Massachusetts killing entered the U.S. recently as UAC’s and both have
ties to MS-13, according to authorities cited by various outlets. They
lived in Everett and one of the teens, Cristian Nunez-Flores, moved to
Massachusetts from his native El Salvador a year and a half ago which is
when the influx of Central American minors began. His parents remain in
El Salvador, according to a local news article. The other gangbanger’s
name is Jose Vasquez Ardon and he too is a recent arrival from Central
America. Prosecutors say the teens, described in a local news article as
“baby-faced boys,” shot a 19-year-old in the head. Both are being held
without bail for obvious reasons.
. . .http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/02/unaccompanied-alien-children-charged-in-execution-style-murder-media-calls-them-baby-faced-boys/

Remember this moment from 2009 when President Obama was trying to
reassure Americans that Obamacare would not benefit illegal immigrants?

"There are also those that claim our reform efforts would insure illegal
immigrants. This too, is false. The reforms I am proposing do not apply
to those who are here illegally," Obama said. "You lie!" South Carolina
Congressman Joe Wilson shouted out.

22.America’s Balkan Values
White liberals and black careerists vigorously reject the MLK ideal of a color-blind society.
By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online, February 9, 2016
. . .
So who is deserving of special set-asides? Take the case of
multimillionaire Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, who fled Mexico’s
censorship and came to America to establish a lucrative career under the
singular protection of the U.S. Constitution as a self-appointed
advocate against supposed American nativism. Has America been so unkind
to Ramos that his children will have to have special help getting into
college, while the progeny of an out-of-work coal miner in West Virginia
or an Armenian farmer in Chico cannot qualify?
. . .http://www.nationalreview.com/article/431014/race-privilege-america

23.A Day in the Life of Central Americans Crossing Mexico
By Silvio Canto, Jr.
American Thinker, February 12, 2016
. . .
First, many families need to send their young men to the U.S. to send
back money. El Salvador receives about $4 billion in remittances or
"remesas." It's probably the strongest safety net in the country. My
guess is that other countries have similar numbers.

Second, the Obama administration refuses to speak clearly and defend
U.S. sovereignty. Also, we indirectly invite people to come north when
we offer legalization to anyone who crosses over.

The attitude in Central America is simple: get to the U.S., and you are likely to stay.

On one hand, we appreciate a young man who wants to cut our grass and
support his mom back home. At the same time, we shouldn't encourage
people to come with vague enforcement language.

24.Rubio's Immigration Plan Will Only Cause Suffering for Americans
By Mark Thies
Overpasses for America, February 8, 2016
. . .
Equally compelling data are stagnant STEM wages, with increases
averaging a tiny 0.4 percent per year from 2000-2012
(cis.org/no-stem-shortage). In 2013, PBS ran a story called “The Bogus
High-Tech Worker Shortage: How Guest Workers Lower US Wages”. And last
week in his blog, Professor Norm Matloff at University of
California-Davis pointed out that computer science starting salaries
went up a microscopic 0.06 percent last year.

H1-B-visa

But if Rubio has his way, prospects for our STEM students will be
getting substantially worse. That’s because of a bill he is
co-sponsoring in the Senate: S. 153, the Immigration and Innovation
(I-Squared) Act. If passed, S. 153 would be a game changer — a bill that
should scare the heck out of parents paying for a STEM education for
their kids. Let’s look at how I-Squared will make it even harder for
Americans to get good-paying jobs.

Work visas called H-1B visas are granted to foreign workers who have a
bachelor’s or higher degree in a wide range of areas. S. 153 would
increase the number of H-1B visas from 65,000 up to 245,000. Contrary to
popular belief, there are no worker protections to prevent companies
from firing American workers, replacing them with H-1B’s, and even
forcing them to train their replacements (e.g., Disney).

25.Hispanic Television's Most Influential Racialist
By John Perazzo
FrontPageMag.com, February 8, 2016

The National Council of La Raza (Spanish for “The Race”) once honored
Ramos with its “Ruben Salazar” award for his positive portrayal of
Latinos. It is fitting indeed that Ramos should have been singled out
for praise by an organization obsessed with promoting open borders,
lawlessness, racial and ethnic division, and perpetual anger against a
nation that is supposedly racist to its core. Those are precisely Jorge
Ramos's obsessions as well.
. . .http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/261726/hispanic-televisions-most-influential-racialist-john-perazzo

26.Liberal Race-Baiters Embarrassed on Univision's Al Punto
By Jorge Bonilla
Newsbusters.org, February 9, 2016
. . .
The panel featured Democrat Freddy Balsera, and Republicans Adolfo
Franco and Otto Reich. When you factor Ramos, this adds up to an even
panel.

Balsera dutifully took Ramos' first softball and dished out a steaming
pile of racial vitiation against Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, charging both
with being "anti-Hispanic" and "anti-immigrant". The evidence offered
to support that claim is that they both built a base of support beyond
the community (unlike, say, Luis Gutiérrez - whose district consists of
the Puerto Rican neighborhood, the Mexican neighborhood, and the stretch
of interstate that connects the two), the claim that they don't grant
interviews to the network (false), and the charge that Cruz doesn't
speak Spanish (which didn't stop the network from anointing Julián
Castro).

27.On Immigration, Time for the West to be Realistic
By Michael Curtis
American Thinker, February 9, 2016
. . .
Some of these parties are virulent in their opposition to immigration
and their fear of the challenge to Western values. Nevertheless, two
factors are relevant. It is not racist to suggest that, for practical
reasons, reasonable limits be put on those attempting to immigrate.
Considering the millions desiring to leave not only from the Middle
East, but also from Africa, Europe faces the possibility of an enormous
increase in scale and an uncontrollable pressure. That pressure becomes
even more potent since the native population of Europe is aging and
declining.

28.After Hiring 1,000 New DMV Bureaucrats, California Issues 605,000 Licenses to Illegals
By Monica Showalter
Investor's Business Daily, February 10, 2016
. . .
Apparently the biggest reason they didn’t issue all of them this year is
that so many illegals lacked basic literacy skills in any language,
according to the Los Angeles Daily News.

The Daily News reported that the spike in driver’s license applications
didn’t lead to a rise in vehicle registrations or insurance purchasing,
either, as might be expected given the rationale that Gov. Jerry Brown
gave for opening the door to illegals’ driver’s licenses when he signed
AB60 last year.

What the law does do is open the door for vast new benefits for
illegals, something they have not hesitated to take advantage of, given
the failure of the Obama administration to show any will to enforce U.S.
law. A large number have received $750 million in illegal health care
subsidies under ObamaCare, despite the president’s hard-argued selling
point to the public that “those individuals” would not qualify.

29.WSJ: Arizona’s Pro-American Immigration Reform Boosts Wages, Productivity, Housing
By Neil Munro
Breitbart.com, February 10, 2016
. . .
All those economic, social and technological benefits emerged from only a
40 percent drop in illegal population caused by the state’s modest
reforms, and despite President Barack Obama’s refusal to seriously
enforce popular federal laws intended to bar illegal migration. Also,
there was no recorded drop in the annual inflow of legal immigrants. The
state reforms only “barred [illegals] from receiving government
benefits, including nonemergency hospital care … drivers’ licenses and …
in-state tuition rates.”

30.Dear Mexico: You Might Wind Up Paying For That Wall After All
By Jazz Shaw
HotAir.com, February 10, 2016

Over the weekend the former president of Mexico took a rather scoffing
tone when he said that Mexico wasn’t going to pay one cent for Donald
Trump’s “stupid wall.” This is a knock we’ve heard from plenty of The
Donald’s critics back here at home as well, coming from Democrats and
Republicans alike. I mean… it’s crazy, right? How could anyone expect
that to happen?

There’s an article this week over at The Last Refuge which might be
worth a look if you’ve got an open mind on the subject. One of the less
commented on aspects of international relations with Mexico is the
volume of cash which Mexicans living in America (including illegal
aliens) send home every year to their families. There’s nothing shocking
about the idea at first glance. People send money home all the time.
But just how much is it?
. . .
Is it possible? Absolutely, assuming you can mount the pressure required
to make it happen. It would be complicated and politically messy, but
such things don’t seem to bother Trump much to begin with. It all comes
down to the idea of directing law enforcement to direct resources and
vigorous attention to impound all remittance payments derived from
illegal wages. And once the word is out on the street that such payments
are being looked at closely, both through electronic transactions and
the purchase of money orders from banks and post offices, the flow might
not be stopped but it would be severely reduced.
. . .http://hotair.com/archives/2016/02/10/dear-mexico-you-might-wind-up-paying-for-that-wall-after-all/

32.New Jersey Man Slays Child
By Ann Coulter
Human Events Online, February 10, 2016
. . .
Meanwhile, over on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow was agog at the fact that IN
THIS COUNTRY, 66 PERCENT OF GOP VOTERS ARE COMFORTABLE WITH BANNING
MUSLIM IMMIGRANTS.

Her neurotic repetition of the popularity of Trump’s Muslim ban should
be considered an in-kind donation to his campaign. Most people heard it,
and thought: “Is that true? Then I’m definitely switching to Trump.”

Even Muslim immigrants were saying, “I probably won’t commit jihad
myself, but I know some of the Muslims coming definitely will.”

It’s like importing immigrants with Ebola. We feel bad for them, we know
it’s not their fault, but we just can’t let them in. For every 100,000
Muslims we admit, we know that at least a few hundred either plan to
engage in terrorism right away or can be persuaded to engage in
terrorism later. Another 10,000 will send them money or help them hide.

Trump could probably help himself by saying: “Fine. You don’t want a
temporary ban on Muslim immigrants? How about we temporarily suspend all
immigration?” Let’s take a breather while we watch what happens to
Europe.

34.Enforcing Immigration laws Puts Georgia on Right Side of History and Popular Opinion
By D.A. King
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 7, 2016
. . .
It is amusing to see the leftist advocates invoke the very dubious
conclusions of the left-leaning Georgia Budget & Policy Institute’s
latest “report” on immigration and the alleged monetary boost to the
Georgia economy. That is if we would only ignore several federal and
state laws and put illegal aliens in line with American citizens and
legal immigrants in our university admittance offices. And also put them
into our workforce to compete with American workers and their already
stagnant wages.

After that, in the never-ending game of political incrementalism, the
next oft-quoted report would no-doubt carefully explain the
mega-benefits to the Georgia economy if only we had officially open
borders and a constant, unregulated influx of immigrants to replace the
workers already struggling to live the American Dream in their own
country.

All concerned should pay attention to the legislative process under the
Gold Dome on the pending Senate Bill 6. It addresses existing state law
to clear up intentionally created confusion on just who is an illegal
alien after President Obama’s dubious executive action on deferred
action on deportation.

The Impact of US Immigration on Democratic and Republican Election Outcomes

By Giovanni Peri, Anna Maria Mayda, and Walter Steingress

VoxEU.org, February 2, 2016
. . .
An important aspect of the political effect of migration, which has
received less attention in the US debate, is that natives' votes too can
be affected by the increase in the share of immigrants, through the
indirect channel described above. When we distinguish between the effect
of naturalised and non-naturalised immigrants, our empirical analysis
shows that this is indeed the case. The impact of immigration on
Republican votes in the House is negative when the share of naturalised
migrants in the voting population increases. Yet, it is positive when
the share of non-citizen migrants increases above a threshold.2 Our
results are consistent with naturalised migrants being less likely to
vote for the Republican Party than native voters, and with native
voters' political preferences moving in favour of the Republican Party
but only at high levels of non-citizen immigrant shares. This second
effect is significant only for quite high shares of (non-citizen)
immigrants (above 0.132). According to CPS data as of 2012, only in six
US states (California, District of Columbia, Nevada, New Jersey, New
York and Texas) was this share sufficiently high to push natives towards
the Republican Party. For the other states, the share of
non-naturalised immigrants in the population was less than 13.2% in 2012
(and it still is) and the corresponding impact on Republican votes of
non-citizen immigrants was null to negative.
. . .http://www.voxeu.org/article/us-immigration-s-electoral-impact-new-evidence

The GOP's Suicidal Immigration Stance

By Jacob Sullum

Townhall.com, February 3, 2016
. . .
On the face of it, the Republican Party is not in a very pro-immigrant
mood. Yet the positions staked out by Cruz and Trump are unpopular even
among Republicans and could prove fatal to a party that needs support
from Hispanic voters to win.

In the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Trump remains
the front-runner nationally, polling at or above 30 percent, and
hostility to immigration is the most prominent theme of his campaign.
The billionaire reality TV star, who has disparaged Mexican immigrants
as criminals, rapists, and drug dealers, promises to end birthright
citizenship, triple the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement
officers, "humanely" deport 11 million unauthorized immigrants, and
build a wall on our southern border at the Mexican government's expense.

Reader comment: Opposing illegal immigration and importation of foreign
"refugees is NOT suicidal !!! In fact, the opposite is what is suicidal.
Trump and other GOP candidates are more in touch with the actual
sentiments of the CITIZENS of USA who clearly want closed borders, and
enforcement of immigration laws already on the books !!! Even legal
Hispanic immigrants want an end to Illegals coming into this country and
undercutting them and taking their jobs !!!! And black Americans,
likewise resent jobs that they could have, being farmed out to illegals
!!!

This Is The Jeff Sessions Election and the GOP is Just Along for the Ride

By Lauren Fox

Talking Points Memo, February 1, 2016
. . .
"Ted Cruz was with me, Steve King, Mike Lee and others who were opposed
to this bill. Don't let anyone tell you differently," Sessions said,
according to a report from al.com.

The truth of the matter is that if Sessions were to endorse Trump over
Cruz or Cruz over Trump, it might actually have an impact on the
first-in-the-nation presidential contest. Earlier this week a key
Sessions aide, Stephen Miller, left the senator's office to join the
Trump campaign.

For now, however, Sessions says, he's just there to be helpful. He's not endorsing anyone.

"I don't know if I will ever endorse anybody, but I do believe that a
candidate who can effectively understand and articulate the American
people's concerns on immigration and on trade can win this election,"
Sessions said. "Everybody is for the economy, everybody is for GDP,
everybody is for more education, everybody is for more highways. How do
you distinguish yourself?"

* Work with sanctuary jurisdictions to change their policies, and if
they do not, take legal action to compel their compliance with federal
law;

* Beginning this year, amend the grant application forms for the
Byrne/Justice Assistance Grants (JAG), Community Oriented Policing
Services (COPS) grants, and State Criminal Alien Assistance Program
(SCAAP) reimbursement program to require agencies seeking these funds to
swear that they do not have policies that violate Section 1373; and

* Deny funding to any non-compliant sanctuary jurisdictions.

In addition, he asks the attorney general to look at whether
jurisdictions that release criminal aliens sought by ICE are in
violation of 8 USC 1324, the federal felony statute that prohibits
anyone from shielding illegal aliens from detection. After all, these
jurisdictions have been notified in writing by the detainers (federal
Form I-247) that the aliens' identities and status have been confirmed
by biometric fingerprint matching, and that federal agents wish to take
custody of the aliens, and/or to be notified of the date, time, and
place of release — so the sanctuaries are knowingly releasing deportable
aliens sought by ICE. He said that he will consider applying this
section of the law next year to block funding to jurisdictions that
release criminal aliens sought by ICE. This action could affect the
hundreds of agencies that fail to comply with or accept ICE detainers,
for example.
. . .
http://www.cis.org/vaughan/house-appropriations-sanctuaries

It’s
ironic that some of the illegal immigrant minors that the Obama
administration claims to have rescued from “persistent violence in
Central America” have been placed in abusive homes by the U.S.
government. Some have even been forced to become prostitutes or personal
slaves, according to a scathing Senate investigation that’s ignited
bipartisan fury.

A
Customs and Border Protection vehicle patrols on the Texas border near
the Rio Grande, Thursday, July 24, 2014, in Mission, Texas. Texas is
spending $1.3 million a week for a bigger DPS presence along the border.

Gov. Greg Abbott and U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar,
a Laredo Democrat, pressed the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on
Monday to explain why the agency plans to reduce its aerial surveillance
on the Texas-Mexico border.In a letter
to DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, the lawmakers said the cut to a requested
3,850 hours of aerial detection and monitoring in 2016 amounts to 50
percent less coverage than recent years.“Given
the recent surge of migrants from Central America and Cuba along the
southern border, we believe DHS should request more surveillance and
security resources, not fewer,” Abbott and Cuellar wrote in a letter.
The pair also reminded Johnson that in September, Abbott’s office asked the DHS for more aerial resources and U.S. Border Patrol agents but that the request was never acknowledged.
A DHS spokesperson said the agency would respond "directly" to the governor and the congressman.

Monday’s
request comes as CBP is reporting a new surge in the number of
undocumented immigrants crossing the Rio Grande. From October to
December of 2015, about 10,560 unaccompanied minors entered Texas
illegally through the Rio Grande Valley sector of the U.S. Border
Patrol. That marks a 115 percent increase over the same time frame in
2014. The amount of family units, defined as at least one child and
adult guardian or parent, has increased by 170 percent to 14,336 in the
Rio Grande Valley.

The El Paso sector also saw 1,030 unaccompanied minors, an increase of almost 300 percent.In
Monday’s letter, the pair also requested a detailed breakdown of how
the DHS determined the reduction in aerial surveillance was warranted
and information on how staffing and operation levels would be affected.
While
Abbott has spoken extensively about illegal immigration from Mexico and
Central America, the letter marked the first time Abbott has
referenced a recent surge of Cubans coming into Texas.
Abbott visited
the island nation last year to explore expanding trade between Cuba and
Texas. During that trip, he spoke about the current trade embargo but
not the migrant issue.
During the 2015 fiscal year, about 28,400
Cubans entered Texas through U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Laredo
field office, which extends from Del Rio to Brownsville. That’s
compared to about 15,600 in 2014.
The surge came after the Obama
administration announced in 2014 its plans to re-establish ties with
Cuba, leaving many Cubans fearing they will lose a special designation
that allows them to apply for legal residency status, or a “green card,”
after living in the country for a year. Cuellar and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, have called for the repeal of that designation.

House Appropriations Boss Initiates Crackdown on Sanctuaries

Today
the chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee in charge of
funding the Department of Justice, John Culberson (R-Texas), put the
Obama administration on notice that it must take steps to rein in
sanctuary jurisdictions or risk problems getting approval for its own
budget requests. In addition, Culberson announced that he will begin
requiring local jurisdictions to follow federal law and stop
obstructing communication with immigration agencies as a condition for
receiving certain federal law enforcement funding.

BLOG:
LIKE ALL OF OBAMA'S CABINET, ONE MUST FIRST BE CONNECTED TO THE
BANKSTER SECTOR AND SECONDLY BE AN ADVOCATE FOR OPEN BORDERS, SABOTAGE
E-VERIFY AND PROMOTE THE INTERESTS OF LA RAZA ABOVE LEGALS. THAT IS
EXACTLY WHAT LORETTA LYNCH HAS AND WILL DO.

In a sternly worded letter
to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Culberson said that he has a
responsibility to ensure that state and local law enforcement agencies
are following federal law before they can get federal grants. He said
that sanctuary policies restricting communication between local and
federal officials are a clear violation of Section 1373
of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Among the jurisdictions that
have imposed such policies are San Francisco, Cook County, Ill., and New
York City. In addition to prohibiting local officers from communicating
with immigration authorities, these jurisdictions bar federal officers
from coming into jails to interview or arrest deportable criminals.

State
and local sanctuary policies obstruct immigration enforcement and
cause the release of criminal aliens back to the streets of American
communities. According to ICE records that the Center obtained in a
FOIA request, in 2014 more than 9,000 criminal aliens that ICE was
seeking to deport were instead released. More than 2,300 of these
criminal aliens went on to commit additional crimes within just a few
months.

The three law enforcement funding programs that
could become off-limits to sanctuaries currently dispense more than $1
billion a year to state and local agencies.
Mr. Culberson contacted the Center shortly after the publication of this information
in July, saying that he had long sought concrete information on the
extent of this problem and that he was determined to use his authority
to address it. The Center has compiled a list of over 300 cities,
counties, and states that have laws, ordinances, regulations,
resolutions, policies, or other practices that protect criminal aliens
from deportation — either by refusing to or prohibiting agencies from
complying with ICE detainers, imposing unreasonable conditions on
detainer acceptance, or otherwise impeding open communication and
information exchanges between their employees or officers and federal
immigration officers. These jurisdictions are noted on a map here.
Culberson's letter outlines several steps he expects the Justice Department to take:

Beginning
this year, amend the grant application forms for the Byrne/Justice
Assistance Grants (JAG), Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS)
grants, and State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP)
reimbursement program to require agencies seeking these funds to swear
that they do not have policies that violate Section 1373; and

Work
with sanctuary jurisdictions to change their policies, and if they do
not, take legal action to compel their compliance with federal law;

Deny funding to any non-compliant sanctuary jurisdictions.

In addition, he asks the attorney general to look at whether
jurisdictions that release criminal aliens sought by ICE are in
violation of 8 USC 1324,
the federal felony statute that prohibits anyone from shielding illegal
aliens from detection. After all, these jurisdictions have been
notified in writing by the detainers (federal Form I-247) that the
aliens' identities and status have been confirmed by biometric
fingerprint matching, and that federal agents wish to take custody of
the aliens, and/or to be notified of the date, time, and place of
release — so the sanctuaries are knowingly releasing deportable aliens
sought by ICE. He said that he will consider applying this section of
the law next year to block funding to jurisdictions that release
criminal aliens sought by ICE. This action could affect the hundreds of
agencies that fail to comply with or accept ICE detainers, for example.

Culberson
warned that if the administration stubbornly continues to tolerate
sanctuaries, he will find it hard to look favorably on any spending
requests from DOJ in the coming appropriations season: "I hope the
attorney general will do the right thing here so that I am not
compelled to object to relevant portions of the Department's spending
plan and reprogramming requests. Any refusal by the Department to comply
with these reasonable and timely requests will factor heavily in my
consideration of their 2017 budget requests."

Even
following public outcry over a series of cases of murders committed by
criminal aliens after release by sanctuaries, including the killing of
Kate Steinle in San Francisco, the Obama administration has resisted
calls for action to discourage or punish the jurisdictions that obstruct
immigration enforcement. Instead, it has pressed ahead in implementing
the so-called Priority Enforcement Program, which explicitly allows
sanctuary policies that violate federal law. It's clear that the
administration is more interested in protecting criminal aliens than in
protecting the public from their acts; now we'll see if the Department
of Justice is willing to jeopardize its own funding to spare
sanctuaries from being sanctioned, and if the sanctuaries are willing
to sacrifice federal funding in order to protect criminal aliens.

Surge in Illegal Aliens, 500% Increase in Some U.S. Ports of Entry

Judicial Watch Corruption Chronicles, December 30, 2015

The
agency’s own statistics certainly contradict that, showing that the
southern border region is as porous and vulnerable as ever. Other entry
ports that saw large hikes in Central American illegal immigrants
during the first two months of this fiscal year include Del Rio, Texas
(269%), El Centro, California (216%) and Rio Grande Valley, Texas
(154%). The Border Patrol breaks the stats down by “family unit” and
illegal immigrants under the age of 18, referred to as “Unaccompanied
Alien Children” or UAC. The Rio Grande Valley port of entry topped the
list in both categories with 8,537 family units and 6,465 UACs during
the two-month period. In all, the nation’s nine southern border
crossings saw an average of 173% increase in family units and a 106%
increase in minors during the short period considered.

Some
of the illegal immigrants are Mexican nationals, but the overwhelming
majority comes from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The government
records show that somehow 4,450 family units from El Salvador evaded
our topnotch border security and entered the United States in a period
of only two months. Guatemala and Honduras had 3,934 and 3,203
respectively. Mexico had 538 family units. Of interesting note is that,
during this period, the Border Patrol reports 35,234 apprehensions in
the region of foreigners labeled by the government as “Other Than
Mexican” or OTM. This is a term used by federal authorities to refer to
nationals of countries that represent a terrorist threat to the U.S.
. . .http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2015/12/surge-in-illegal-aliens-500-increase-in-some-u-s-ports-of-entry/

Houston Slayings Fueled Border Security Debate

Dan Golvach, father of Spencer Golvach, at his son's grave in Houston Tuesday, October 20, 2015.

The
Texas Tribune is taking a yearlong look at the issues of border
security and immigration, reporting on the reality and rhetoric around
these topics. Sign up to get story alerts.

HOUSTON — Julie Golvach remembers that something felt “off” the night she lost her only child.
It
was exactly one year ago today, a few minutes before 1 a.m. Standing
in the driveway of her Houston home, waving goodbye to her sister under
a clear winter sky, something didn't feel right. The stars didn’t look
the same.
Golvach tossed and turned in bed for a while but was sound asleep when a knock on the door came at 6 a.m.
“I jumped up and I knew,” she said.
She
stopped by her son’s boyhood bedroom, the one with the window looking
out onto the driveway. He’d slept there a week earlier, the evening
they went to see "American Sniper" together. She slipped past the
picture of him and his best childhood friend on the wall, skirting the
bed with the stuffed toy lamb — a baby shower relic — lying on top.
Out
the window, Golvach saw three people — two uniformed police officers
and a woman wearing a shirt that read “chaplain.” Her chest pounded as
she made her way to the front door and opened it.
“Is it Spencer?” she asked.
The
second those words tumbled out of her mouth, she knew the answer, just
as she had known when she uttered that exact phrase the day he was born,
before anyone told her if the baby was a boy or a girl. She just knew.
It was Spencer.One night off
Spencer
Golvach grew up in the sprawl of northwest Houston, surrounded by
guitars and destined for a career in music, his father’s passion.
When
he turned 16 in 2005 and got his driver’s license, the easygoing
musician started working at a local guitar store in a strip mall not
far from Jersey Village High School, where he excelled in shop class and
anything he could do with his hands.
He had always fiddled with
his dad’s guitars, and he developed a knack for fixing and rebuilding
them at the store. A few years later, when the shop owner announced his
retirement, Spencer decided to buy the Cy-Fair area business.

Spencer
Golvach, at the age of three, pictured with a guitar. Authorities say
Golvach was killed by Victor Reyes, an undocumented immigrant, during a
random shooting spree in January 2015.

With nine
employees and a soft economy, life as an entrepreneur proved tough
sledding. He struggled to turn a profit, and he took a second full-time
job as a receiving lead and forklift operator at a local warehouse.
Even
that wasn’t enough to cover the bills. By early 2015, Spencer was
preparing to move into a smaller — and cheaper — space in the same
shopping mall. He could hardly wait for Saturday, Jan. 31 to arrive, the
day the slimmed-down version of Spencer’s Guitar Shop was set to open.
Between giving guitar lessons, working an 8-to-5 day job, building out
the new store and playing bass in his band — The Dead Revolt — Spencer
needed a break.
“The guy was burning the candle at both ends for a
long time,” recalled Dan Golvach, his father. “He takes one night off,
to go take his girlfriend out for her birthday. That was Jan. 30. And
he drops her off ... and 15 minutes later he pulls up to that red
light.”
Less than a mile from his apartment, Spencer steered into
the left turn lane at 18th Street and Mangum Road and waited for the
green light. The details of what happened next are captured in the
records of two police agencies, more than a dozen news articles and the
unceasing nightmares of Spencer’s parents and loved ones.
An
undocumented Mexican national named Victor Reyes, a native of Reynosa
along the Texas-Mexico border, pulled up next to Spencer's beloved
white Toyota pickup. He pointed a pistol at Spencer’s head and pulled
the trigger.
The bullet went through the passenger side window and into Spencer’s skull, at the top of his right ear.
“I
choose to believe it killed him instantly,” his father said in an
interview months later. “I think he was just there and then it’s like
someone turned the lights off. I don’t think he suffered.”
But the
Golvach family’s suffering — compounded by the feeling that Spencer’s
death could have been prevented — was just beginning.
Houston
police, their report indicates, found 25-year-old Spencer dead in his
truck at 12:56 a.m. — right around the moment Julie Golvach, waving
goodbye to her sister, couldn't shake the feeling that something was
off.
A few hours later, she was phoning her ex-husband to break the news.

“I couldn’t make out what she was saying and I finally just said, ‘is my son dead?’”— Dan Golvach

“She
was just inconsolable,” he recalled. “I couldn’t make out what she was
saying and I finally just said, ‘is my son dead?’ She said, ‘yes.’
Then of course I started. I joined the chorus.”
More than a
thousand people attended Spencer’s memorial service, a tribute to his
fun-loving nature and penchant for making friends across generational,
ethnic and gender lines.
Those who knew Spencer universally
describe him as fun-loving and strikingly calm. After he died, a family
friend ordered up a batch of commemorative rubber bracelets emblazoned
with his laid-back motto: “Chill Don’t Freeze."

A bloody rampage
More
than once since the funeral, Julie Golvach has found herself wishing
that her son’s attacker had gotten to know Spencer. She’s convinced he
never would have pulled the trigger. But the official evidence of the
crime, while scant, suggests Spencer was chosen randomly. And he wasn’t
the only victim.
Police say Reyes shot a man in the face,
wounding him, in the suburban city of Jersey Village minutes before
killing Spencer, and they connected him to at least two more random
shootings shortly thereafter. All told, Reyes shot two dead and wounded
three others before a Harris County Sheriff’s deputy took him down
after a violent shootout, officials say.
John Weston, 67, says
he’s lucky to be alive after encountering Reyes on the Hempstead Highway
near Pinemont, about 10 minutes north of where Spencer had just been
killed. He remembers seeing a big, dark truck driving aggressively
behind him. When he got to the stoplight, it pulled up alongside him.
“All
of a sudden I hear this ungodly noise,” Weston recalled. “I don’t know
if you can imagine how fast your mind works, but I saw a shattered
window and I saw a bullet hole in my window. My mind is thinking, ‘Oh
my goodness, somebody’s shooting at me and this guy at this light.’”
He
pressed his foot to the accelerator to get out of the line of fire,
but not soon enough. He heard the second shot, and its impact felt like
someone “hauled off and hit you upside the head,” he said.
Weston
realized the truck's driver was the gunman. “I saw blood everywhere,”
he said. His hands were covered in it, so he could only manage to
re-dial on his cell phone. He finally reached his wife, who told him to
go to the nearest toll booth. An ambulance was called. Doctors found
that a bullet had entered his left cheek and stuck in the other side of
his mouth.
A year later, after reconstructive surgery to replace a
badly shattered jaw, his mouth remains completely numb below the
tongue. With his health woes and lost time at work, he’s struggling to
keep his printing business afloat.
“Everything I do now is a
little more difficult, but considering I’m here talking, I’m blessed to
be here,” Weston said. “It’s scarred me forever. I don’t break down
and cry, but I think about it all the time.”
Had Reyes been a
homegrown criminal, the story might have ended in the empty field where
the deputy shot him — chalked up as another random act of violence in a
city and nation all too used to them.
But as word spread about
Reyes’ long criminal record and multiple deportations, the case was
thrust into the volatile debate over illegal immigration and control of
the southern border: first in local news stories, then at the Capitol
in Austin and most recently on the presidential campaign trail — on
a stage in mid-November with GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump in
Beaumont, where Dan Golvach spoke out and held up a poster of Spencer
along with others killed by undocumented immigrants.Gunman's long recordAccording
to the Houston office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Reyes
had been removed from the country four times between 2003 and 2010, but
little is publicly known about what he was doing in Houston prior to
terrorizing its northwest environs — or why he did it.His
criminal and illegal entry records stretch back at least to 2002 when,
at age 18, he was convicted of burglarizing a building in Hidalgo
County, across the border from Reynosa, which he told police was his
place of birth. He spent a month and a half in jail before a state court
sentenced him to three years' probation, ordered him to pay an $850
fine and mandated 120 hours of community service.

Victor
Reyes, shown in 2001 jail mug shot from Hidalgo County. Authorities say
Reyes, an undocumented immigrant, went on a January 2015 shooting
spree in Harris County that killed two and wounded three.

A
year later, he was back in the Hidalgo County Jail for breaking a beer
bottle over a man’s head at the Tejano Saloon in Pharr. He was sent
back to Mexico after serving about a month in the local jail, but he
came back. By then, his previous probation had been revoked, and he
served several months in a state jail in Raymondville.Deported
again on Jan. 20, 2004, Reyes was caught trying to cross the border the
next day, triggering a 90-day sentence in federal prison and yet
another deportation — his third.A
few months later, on Aug. 10, he was caught again, in McAllen, and
received a one-year federal prison sentence for his fourth known illegal
re-entry. His crimes didn’t end there. A few weeks before his prison
release date, Reyes beat up a fellow inmate — described by his lawyer as
a rival gang member — cutting and fracturing his face, according to
federal court records.Two
new assault charges made Reyes eligible for 20 years behind bars.
Despite his history of violence, burglary and repeat illegal crossings,
federal prosecutors offered Reyes a deal: In exchange for a guilty plea
on one of the counts, and in recognition of his “truthful testimony”
and “acceptance of responsibility,” they promised to give him a sentence
“at the lowest end of the applicable guidelines” on a single charge,
court papers show. Under the plea bargain, Reyes' sentence was 63
months, a quarter of the maximum he faced under the two counts.That’s
a few more spoonfuls of salt in the wound for Dan and Julie Golvach.
Had Reyes been given even half of his possible sentence on the two
assault counts, he would have been in prison instead of at that traffic
light killing their son.
“The people who agreed to this
deal need to be held accountable,” Julie Golvach said. “The result was
the horrific murder of my son.”
The prosecutor who signed the plea
agreement, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tim Hammer, declined to talk about
the case, referring questions to U.S. Justice Department spokeswoman
Angela Dodge in Houston.
Dodge sent The Texas Tribune a
boilerplate description of plea deals, saying they “ensure a resolution
of the case and that someone is convicted of the crime(s) we believe
they committed without going through the time and expense of a trial,”
while providing “justice for all.” She declined to say whether
prosecutors took Reyes' previous crimes into account, or if they
frequently offer plea deals to convicted criminals who commit additional
crimes behind bars.
It’s another official secret in a case with no shortage of them.Family still seeking answers
The
Houston Police Department, using its own discretion under the Public
Information Act, blocked release of all but a few details on the
Golvach and Weston shootings. The department cited a provision allowing
it to withhold criminal records absent a final disposition, such as a
conviction or deferred adjudication. Since Reyes is dead and the city’s
case is otherwise closed, that means Houston police likely can withhold
the information indefinitely.
The Harris County Sheriff’s Office
declined to release its investigative files, but for an entirely
different reason: After every officer-involved shooting — in this case,
a deputy ended Reyes’ deadly rampage — the Harris County district
attorney’s office presents the case to a grand jury even if no one
complains. That happened last week, just days before the one-year
anniversary of the shooting spree.
The federal government holds
onto its files with a tight grip, too, citing the 1974 U.S. Privacy
Act. The act covers only U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents,
but Immigration and Customs Enforcement has decreed that its
protections apply to federal immigration detention records, even those
related to undocumented immigrants convicted of horrific crimes. The
agency voluntarily released a narrative of its multiple encounters with
Reyes, but the Tribune has not yet heard back from ICE or U.S.
Citizenship & Immigration Services on its written request for his
entire immigration file.

The
secrecy across local and federal agencies that came into contact with
Reyes confounded and frustrated the people touched by his violence.
Weston said his wife became “very disillusioned” about their quest for
even the simplest answers.

Dan
Golvach, father of Spencer Golvach, in Houston Tuesday, October 20,
2015 at the intersection where his son was killed by an undocumented
immigrant in January.

“I mean, we asked them, ‘Who
was the guy?’” Weston said. “We had to fill out paperwork and all that
kind of stuff, but we never got any satisfactory answer. It was almost
like it was top secret information.”
Hoping to break through the
bureaucratic walls and get some answers about who killed their son and
why, the Golvaches eventually hired a former investigative reporter,
ex-KTRK-TV newsman Wayne Dolcefino. In a letter last year to
then-Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia, Dolcefino said the sheriff’s
office was “doing a disservice to this crime victim by not responding
to this request in a proper manner.” The local investigative files
remained sealed as of late last week, but the Harris County Sheriff's
Office asked the Tribune to resubmit its request for the records and
promised a quick turnaround.
Even with new information beginning
to trickle out, the victims and their families still don't know where
Reyes lived or if he had a job, who owned the truck he was driving that
night or — least of all — the motive for his deadly rampage.
According to Harris County Assistant District Attorney Heyward Carter, some elements of the senseless crime may never be known.
Carter,
who handled a single aspect of the case — the officer-involved
shooting — was able to speak about the case for the first time last
week. He revealed that Reyes was "extremely intoxicated" and had a
"significant amount of cocaine" in his system. He also identified the
weapon, a .380 caliber pistol, that he said was legally purchased at
one point, but authorities haven't determined how a convicted felon and
undocumented immigrant, barred from buying or possessing firearms,
obtained it.

“We live in an age of mass shootings, and even though this one didn’t get a whole lot of publicity, that’s what this is."

— Heyward Carter, Harris County Assistant District Attorney

Carter
also provided details about the actions of the Harris County deputy
sheriff, Javier Rojas, who finally put an end to the deadly rampage. By
chance, Rojas was patrolling the area and heard shots being fired. He
saw the truck of Reyes' final victim, identified by police as Juan
Garcia, in obvious distress, weaving randomly at an intersection.
Garcia later died from his wounds, and a woman in the car with him was
slightly injured from the broken glass.
Rojas chased after Reyes,
who crashed his truck through a barrier at the end of a dead end street
and went another 200 yards or so into an empty field. Rojas continued
the pursuit on foot and found Reyes crouching behind the truck. He
ordered the suspect to drop his weapon but Reyes stood and fired at the
officer instead. Rojas returned fire and struck him in the chest. When
authorities photographed the body his hand was still gripping the
pistol "with his finger on the trigger," Carter said.
In terms of
a motive, authorities can only speculate based on a conversation Reyes
had with a supposed girlfriend about three hours before the shooting
spree began. He wanted her to go out to a bar or nightclub with him,
and she turned him down. Authorities speculate he may have been taking
out his rage on couples: It's possible he saw Spencer Golvach dropping
off his girlfriend shortly before shooting him at the red light and
then targeted Garcia after seeing he had a woman in his vehicle.
But it's just a theory.
“We
live in an age of mass shootings, and even though this one didn’t get a
whole lot of publicity, that’s what this is," Carter said. "I don’t
understand why he was doing it.”
Carter did confirm what the families had learned from detectives
in the immediate aftermath of the shootings: Reyes still had plenty of
ammunition left in his truck — suggesting that he was planning a more
extensive shooting spree. There were at least 20 live rounds left in the
vehicle, and he appeared to be reloading while driving near the scene
of his final attack.
“Had this officer not been there just
coincidentally ... there were plenty of roads for him to go down. He
had plenty of ammo, and it didn't seem like he was stopping, that's for
sure," Carter said. "As horrible as this situation was, it could have
been way worse.”
After the facts were presented to grand jury last
Wednesday, the panel decided not to proceed with any further action
related to the incident. The Golvach family calls Rojas' response
heroic."Why was he allowed to be here?"Julie
Golvach burst out into tears again last week after hearing for the
first time some of the details of the crime that took her son's life. “I
really feel I deserve to know what brought them together at that point
in time, what caused him to shoot my son,” she said. “I think we
deserve to know why he was even here — why he was allowed to be here.”
It’s
a common refrain among those who have been victimized by people in the
country illegally. They weren’t supposed to be here in the first
place, and the government's inability to keep them from crossing the
southern border after they’ve been deported — and prevent them from
committing crimes — provokes a unique brand of helplessness and outrage.
Even
Weston, a lifelong Democrat who attended both of Barack Obama’s
inaugurations and favors allowing otherwise law-abiding immigrants into
the United States to work and seek a better life, said he had to fight
the urge to call Donald Trump and tell him he was “dead-on” with his
focus on foreigners who commit crimes here.
“Somebody’s got to do
something about it,” he said. In the same breath, Weston emphasized
that he doesn’t support Trump for president and said keeping dangerous
felons from crossing the border or entering the vast illegal workforce
defied simplistic solutions.
“If there’s some way to filter out
the ones that intend to harm people, I would be in support of that,” he
said. “It may prevent something like this from happening to somebody
else.”
Dan Golvach is more blunt and outspoken. A few weeks after
his son’s murder, he was at the state Capitol testifying in favor of
2015 state legislation — ultimately doomed — that would have prohibited
local law enforcement authorities in Texas from adopting “sanctuary”
policies that keep police out of immigration matters.
Then late
last year, he appeared with Trump at a campaign rally in Beaumont,
saying his son died as “the result of politically correct politics” —
namely, bipartisan policies that he believes go too easy on
undocumented immigrants and the people who hire them.
“When you
lose the thing you love the most, you’re not that worried about being
PC,” Golvach said in an interview. “If you’re going to come here, you
need to do it legally on our terms, not your terms.”
Golvach
readily admits that anger over his son’s killing sometimes hits “toxic”
levels. He says he’s still haunted by the image of Spencer in a
hastily chosen coffin, still upset he was killed right next to the
stadium where he used to watch baseball as a kid, still mad as hell that
the government won’t cough up the records they have on his son’s
killer.
It would be worse without all the good memories of his
son, and without the certainty that if Spencer were alive today he
would say to him: “chill don’t freeze.”
“He’d tell me, ‘Don’t
have a heart attack. You know, clear your mind and keep it cool,'” he
said. “He would tell me not to hate anybody.”

Concrete Evidence of the Continuing Plunge in Both Civil and Criminal Immigration Enforcement

By Dan Cadman

CIS Immigration Blog, January 23, 2016

Two
recent reports from Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access
Clearinghouse (TRAC) reflect the continued erosion of immigration
enforcement under the Obama administration.

On January
20, TRAC reported that criminal prosecution for immigration offenses
fell 22.3 percent from November 2014 to November 2015, and more than 36
percent over the course of five years, excluding magistrate court
(which deals exclusively with petty offenses).

The
following day, TRAC announced that "ICE [Immigration and Customs
Enforcement] Detainer Use Stabilizes Under Priority Enforcement
Program". The Priority Enforcement Program (PEP) is the replacement to
the Secure Communities Program mandated by Homeland Security Security
Jeh Johnson as a part of the president's "executive actions" on
immigration. It significantly restricts the ability of immigration
agents to file detainers against aliens arrested by police on criminal
charges.

I have no idea what TRAC means by
"stabilizes". A quick look at Figure 1a of their report shows a more
accurate state of affairs, if one considers the number of detainers
being filed over the course of five years, from a high in April 2011,
when Secure Communities became fully effective nationwide and kicked
into high gear, versus October 2015. I would use other phrases:
"plummeted" or "Dropped like a stone". Or, as my colleague Jessica
Vaughan has noted, particularly in relation to detainers filed at
county jails, where the lion's share of criminals of any stripes are
held after being booked for offenses small and large: "a stunning free
fall".